Soul Strut

Drop image/file

<blockquote> it might be even harder to cash in on your gains. </blockquote> And that's the other problem...knowing when to take profits is just as hard as when to cut losses. You're absolutely right. The book on the right in this picture has a whole chapter dedicated to how to sell and take profits. And yeah, speaking from experience it is pretty hard to do. But if you use a trailing stop loss like I mentioned above it makes it easier. <img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v115/sweendoglongisle/Picture450_17Dec05.jpg" alt="" /> O'Neil teaches in his book that you should take profits in the 20-30% range, unless the stock you pick makes 20% within I think a month. In that case you should hold it longer since it stands a good chance of running for more percentage. If you were to trade options like I do you'd get good at taking profits very fast. You have no choice, options can fluctuate 50, 100 percent a day sometimes. For example, I bought something on a Friday a couple weeks ago and on Monday it went 130% for me. Instead of selling and locking in that beautiful, hard-to-reach percentage I felt that it had more to go so I held. Next day that 130% gain got reduced to a 50% and I sold. Still made 50% profit in two days, but kicked myself for not taking the big boy on Monday. (Mark, plaese to spare me the "pigs get slaughtered" Cramer nonsense). Best part is that the whole trade was based on a weather forecast. Here's an example, let's all play along with Sween on this one. I'm holding some shares of Google at around 345 that I bought in late October when the stock broke out. It's at 430 now. Never mind how many shares, that's not important. Here's what you don't know. Google just got added on Friday to the Nasdaq-100 index. It means that any mutual fund or exchange traded fund or tracking stock that bases itself on that index HAS TO BUY THE SHARES. So basically, by getting added to the index Google just gained more institutional buyers. And, these funds have to buy more shares of the companies with the largest market capitalizations than of the smaller ones. So Google is in a good position. I'm sitting on 19.5% in a little under two months. I have a stop loss set, loose though because Google moves around a lot. What should I do? What would you do?

Cancel

Community