RE:RE:RE:RE:Stop LossWell said. As many of you know, I've owned BTE since 2015 and added over the years, the majority when I was down 75% in April, 2020. So my cost base is jsut under $0.50. Since that time, I've seen BTE drop by 50% several times and I've never sold a share. The most difficult one was $0.69 to $0.45 in late summer 2020 as it took me from slightly green back to red. Nuttall was in at the 40 cent mark earlier that year but then took profits at $0.65 and called BTE a "value trap" on BNN in August 2020.
Nuttall is a brilliant guy, but you can see how constantly monitoring and questioning short term possiblities can give even the best energy investor itchy fingers. He made the same mistake again selling at $1.95 after a nice run, and that time getting burned only a week after the sale as the share price rocketed to $3.00.
I've never sold a share and this latest swoon since June has been the easiest to weather. The floor under the share price improves with each day that they pay back debt and buyback shares. There is no chance this drops to my cost base and selling would only result in less gain. On top of it, the capital gain tax is realized and once I pay that, it's just that much less money I can invest in BTE and other O&G names. Realizing tax gains continuously throughout the year is just one of many ways that traders limit their profits and why they underperform buy and hold investors so badly.
This is easily the greatest investment opportunity in my lifetime and continues to be. There is so much upside here once debt in all these names is virtually zero in a matter of mere months. The prices will have to go higher with massive dividends and buybacks. There is actually way less risk and way more value now than there was in April, 2020, Summer 2021, or even Summer 2022. If I was going to sell because I felt it was too risky to hold, I should have done it back then, not now. I'm not going to cut myself short because I wanted to cozy up to some cash part way up the mountain.
There will be pullbacks again along the way as there have already been, but if you can see past those, there is much more money to be made by holding on rather than trying to pick inflection points in the gyrations of the day to day or week to week price.
marketsense wrote: Ahh, in theory unloading into strength seems like a reasonable strategy. It all
depends on which game you are playing. If its the short game, fine but if its the
long game then your perspective is quite differrent. E.g, if you bought low and have
accumulated a very large position which makes sense because the price was so low,
then selling out on small gains probably isn't what you had in mind. You are looking
to hold much longer and for a much greater return before even considering selling.
The other thing to keep in mind is how the nature of markets can and do change
over time. A large position accumulated when oil was badly out of favour is now
looking at a completely differrent set of circumstances. With the outlook now much
improved and companies behaving fiscally and operationally much smarter, there
is less need to unload each time the market does a little spike IMO. The bigger the
position the more you are looking for the bigger payoff which requires more patience
and obviously more time.