Blue Apron Holdings Inc

Everyone wants to find that one stock they can get rich and retire on. It's the dream, and it's fun to fantasize about.

However, the reality is that you're as likely to find "the one" as you are the Holy Grail.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't try. You absolutely should… just not in the way you probably think.

Not only is it fun trying to find "the one" stock that's going to make you rich, it can also be very fruitful.

Chances are you're not going to find "the one," but that shouldn't stop you from building a portfolio of wannabes. Your millionaire-maker might be in there, but even if it isn't, you can still hit it out of the park with a solid portfolio of 10 or 20 winners.

While it's obviously important to have winners in your portfolio, what's talked about far less is how to avoid losers.

If you can avoid dead weight, your chances of building a monster portfolio are far greater than you ever imagined.

Blue Apron's days, despite first debuting on the NYSE as recently as June 28, may be numbered.

Amid rumors of the company having to go public to raise desperately needed cash, it made its debut exactly when tech stocks were tumbling. As if that wasn't hard enough, its debut also collided with the announcement that Amazon was buying Whole Foods, knocking the company's pre-IPO valuation down from $3.2 billion to $1.9 billion.

Since the stock began trading in the open market, it's down a whopping 36%.

A big chunk of that loss came this week, some might say out of left field.

Left field is, of course, where Amazon lurks before pouncing onto center stage and upending whatever game everyone's playing. The business that Blue Apron thought it controlled got punched in the gut by what Amazon did.

Blue Apron Holdings, the meal-kit delivery company named for the uniform that apprentice chefs wear in France, is seeing red, as in huge losses.

But it gets worse. Blue Apron's stock, which just debuted on June 28, is losing ground even faster than the company's losing subscribers.

Initially founded in 2012, Blue Apron's business model of delivering prepackaged ingredients and recipes to subscribers' doorsteps for them to prepare at home sounded sexy.

The theory was sound. Talk of how the smart business model would disrupt traditional grocery shopping and pose a new challenge to restaurant businesses drew a lot of attention and garnered the young Blue Apron some neat headlines.

But there are headlines, and then there's the story.