Stock Market Investing Stock Advice Important Selling Rules
Post on: 16 Март, 2015 No Comment
Sell if your stock drops 8-10% from the price you paid. I can’t repeat this often enough. If the price begins dropping on high volume, don’t wait for an 8% haircut — sell it now.
Continually re-evaluate to see if the same reasons are still there for owning the stock. If it isn’t one that you would buy today at today’s price, sell it.
If the stock creeps up for several days on very light volume and there are other sell signals, this is a good time to sell it.
If after months of advancing, the stock suddenly jumps way up on heavy volume, maybe 25% or more in just a week or two, it will probably pull back significantly. This is called a climax top. When it makes its biggest one-day rise, sell.
When a stock suddenly jumps up on weak volume, sell.
If a stock closes at the bottom of its day’s trading range on high volume, consider selling half your shares.
If a stock drops below its 50 day moving average on heavy volume, or closes down on record volume, sell.
If there are 3 days with the market dropping on heavy trading, reduce your positions. This may be signaling the start of a bear market, or a baby bear.
If the Put/Call Premium Ratio (found in the Wall Street Journal and IBD) rises to over 2.0, begin reducing your positions. A big market drop is on the way within a few months.
Don’t ever sell and take a profit if your leading stock runs up 20% or more in only 2 or 3 weeks. Most market leaders last a year or more
On any bad news about a company whose stock you own, sell. Wait until the air clears and the stock begins rising again before repurchasing.
When you review your portfolio of stocks, the laggards will clearly stand out. Sell them and buy more of your winners. As many wise investors have found, it’s a good practice to weed your garden regularly.
It is hard to sell a stock at a loss when we believe that we are skillful investors. But are we really that skillful? We can and should control basic investment things like minimizing taxes, keeping trading costs down, and maintaining the quality of our investments.
But no matter how much effort we put into beating the market, we’ll probably be disappointed. We figure that if we spend enough time hunting for hot stocks and searching for the superstar mutual funds, we will spot them.
This is an illusion. We can only control our investment results in a basic way. The rest, for better or worse, is just good or bad luck.
Sometimes you can’t invest in a company because they are owned by someone else, such as Entenmann’s and 7up, both owned by Philip Morris (renamed Altria Group) or Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, owned by Tricon.
The company may also be a privately owned corporation such as Levi Strauss, Domino’s Pizza, Kinko’s, or Hallmark Cards.
