When to sell

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1. When should you sell?

Like many aspects of investment, selling is simple in theory and hard to do well in practice.

Simply put, the time to sell is when you have achieved your investment goal.

If you are uncertain about your goal to begin with, you will never be able to judge with any confidence when that moment has arrived. Your decisions will be driven by emotion rather than reason - and there is no swifter route to disaster than that.

So before you approach the question of selling, you first need to have asked and answered such questions as:

• Am I an investor or a trader?
• If an investor, am I passive or active?
• How long do I generally expect to hold each stock to make my target return?

1. When should you sell? 2. What is your overall strategy? 3. Selling for passive investors 4. When to take profits as a value investor 5. When to take losses as a value investor 6. Selling for growth investors 7. Mechanical formulas for selling 8. Selling in order to reinvest 9. Stoplosses 10. The argument over stoplosses 11. Limitations of stoplosses 12. Profit warnings 13. Selling for traders 14. William O'Neil's trading system 15. The most important rule of all 16. Emotional problems 17. Conclusion