Note to Self: Look to Sell Half!
I’ve gotta write another one of these reminders to myself to take partial profits. I had a real nice trade going early this morning when I bought 1,000 shares of NYNY at $4.94 (I took the ‘dummy‘ entry as it rose above the highs of the 9:45 candle). The stock proceeded to run towards $6 over the next 30 minutes and I was pushing my stop up the whole time to lock in about a third of the gains. I noticed that there was resistance on the daily chart near $6 but since the market was getting stronger I figured I could just let it try to run with the market. Silly me! What I should have done is sold half of the shares up near $6 and left the stop in on the remaining shares. I ended up being stopped out at $5.24 at 10:45 with a gain of about $300. Had I sold half earlier I would have almost doubled that profit.
On the bright side, at least I got out with a gain — the stock is at $4.80 as I type this. 
This post has 4 comments
May 4th, 2005
Yeah, that reminds me of a saying I heard once. Something about “taking profits” and “not going broke.”
May 4th, 2005
Selling is such an art. Actually I don’t fully agree with that saying “You’ll never go broke taking profits”. You can easily go broke if you take small profits and big losses. I find that in practice there’s a fine balancing act between “not going broke taking profits” and “letting your winners run”
May 4th, 2005
I know Maoxian says in those dummy lessons to take windfall profits fast since stocks have a habit of sharply correcting after those. I’d say a 20% gain in 30 minutes would definitely qualify as a “windfall.”
I’m terrible at taking profits. I can’t help thinking about those stocks that double in a day…
May 4th, 2005
I guess that was a bit of a windfall huh?
I’ve had a note on my monitor for years that says “Take windfall profits!” Now I remember why I had to stick that on my monitor.