Cut Your Losses Short

Common advice for stock pickers is to “cut your losses short.” Investors have a tendency to hang onto loser stocks hoping to get their money back, but the experts say that’s a mistake. I have an example from my stock-picking days to illustrate this idea. I bought shares in some sort of fruit company and ended up losing money.

Back in October 2000, I bought 3000 shares at US$20.54. They went down initially, and then bounced around in a range. I didn’t want to sell for a loss and held them. By July 2003, I’d had enough and sold them for US$19.51 each, a loss of just over US$3000.

The problem isn’t just the lost money; I also lost time. If I’d sold this turkey sooner, I could have found a better stock to put my money in.

Thankfully, I didn’t keep holding to lose even more money and time. What if I were still holding this stock? A quick search tells me this stock now sells for ... wait ... that can’t be right. There were stock splits too. Those shares would now be worth US$8.9 million! I’m going to be sick.

That’s right – I used to own 3000 shares of Apple. After splits that’s 42,000 shares today, trading at US$213.04 as I write this. But I sold 16 years ago. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

So, maybe this is a bad example for the advice to cut your losses short. Maybe never selling is a better idea. However, that didn’t work out very well for the Nortel shares I used to have.

Maybe most of us have little idea what we’re doing when we try to pick stocks. Maybe we’re no match for the army of investment professionals around the globe, most of whom can’t even beat the market by enough to cover their expenses.

The larger takeaway here is that most of the stock-picking advice you’ll find in the world will just get you in trouble. I’ve put my money on owning all the stocks instead of trying to pick the right ones.