In trading the market, nobody has a crystal ball. The stock pricing can go down and up immediately. What’s required is an exit plan that will permit you to survive the bad stocks, and make an excellent profit on the good stocks. The strategy that I’ve found to work well is a trailing stop loss. For people that don’t know what a stop loss is, I shall explain quickly. A stop loss is an order for your stock broker to sell your stock if the price dips to the level that you have cited.
There are 2 ways of doing this. The simplest technique is to select how much you are ready to lose as a proportion of your investment. A good rule isn’t to go less than ten percent. Work out the cost of the stock at this level and set that as your stop loss. As the cost of the stock increases, keep moving the level of the stop up to keep the p.c. opening the same. Some brokers provide a trailing stop loss service, where you tell them what % to set the loss at and they do it for you.
The second methodology is a little more complex, and comes from Nicolas Darvas in his book How I made $2,000,000 in the exchange. The markets have a tendency to flow in stages. A stock rising will reach a top, and then dip back down. It may do this many times at every stage. The idea is to follow the chart of the stock and see where the dips are the lowest, and set the stop loss just below them. A second part which Nicolas propounds is that when the stock breaks out of the sideways trend, to buy more of the stock, and when the stock starts going sideways again to move the stop loss up again to slightly below the lowest part of the dip.
Using the stop loss as an exit technique, only works if you stick to it, and not lower it, thinking the price will go up again in 1 or 2 days. In one or two cases you’ll be right, but what often happens is the price keeps moving against you, and you loose far more money. As a secondary to this, the money still tied up in the 1st stock that’s falling cannot be used on another trade.
Eventually , a note of warning about using the stop loss system to guard your capital. There are occasions when the markets goes through a fast fall in price, there are laws about how far a price can fall in one-day. If it falls this maximum distance, it can bypass your stop-loss, and you will lack the ability to sell. Though these eventualities aren’t common, it’s better that you know about them. So they aren’t a shock when they do happen to you.
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