What are you thoughts on when to sell? Hi everyone,
I'm happy to see GUD kicking butt in terms of stock market price performance!
Just wanted to pick everyone's brain and see what are your thoughts and opinons on when is it a good idea to sell a position?
This is speaking in general for any stock you may hold
1) Does everyone have a goal to reach 100% return or more? Once that happens do you sell all? sell a portion? and why?
2) When is it a good time to sell and take profits, are there signals from the market? do you go by gut? quarter report? cycles? trends? Please feel free to elaborate
3) The reason I pose this question is I previously held stocks of BAD (Badger Daylighting) a service company for the oil industry in North America. Incredible performance in the past few years and good fundamentals. It had a fantastic run and I had close to 100% in return. Then of course the oil commodity price drop happened and the stock price dipped all the way back to near 52 week lows. I sold my entire position and took only a couple hundred in profit. It's just crazy how within the year was close to 100% gain and obviously looking back wish I could have sold earlier. Just scary to see how one waited over a year to reach a certain level in gain and then all of a sudden see it trickle down to almost nothing. I'm greatful that I sold before it turned negative, but just goes to show how voiatile the stock market can be depsite good fundamentals etc. Now i'm starting to realize it's a little bit of everything such as timing and fundamentals which one needs to be aware.
My thought process:
a) fundamentals of badger was good, their service growing in US, and should oil price recover it should be all good
b) my concern was the opportunity lost, it may take a year or longer for oil prices and badger's stock price to recover, by this time I assume I would have missed out on opportunities like GUD
c) original plan was to reach 100% gain in BAD, sell half position in BAD. The captial gains from that would be then invested into something else such as GUD. However it back fired cause of oil commodity price drop, so I went with decision to sell Badger and go to GUD. So far I don't regret the decision.
4) Anyone else have interesting stories or experience to share related to GUD or the stock market in general?
Thanks for your time, cheers!