Never hurts to take a profit
No, the quotation is "no one ever went broke taking a profit." Bernard Baruch said he made his fortune by "selling too soon", but there are few of us here would would accept his puny dollar winnings as a goal today (well, uh, inflation etc). In commodity trading the secret is to sell out on the first loss (you guessed wrong) and pyramid a profitable trade. Unless you let your winners run at large, you'll never hit the big ones (it's purely mathematical -- each gain includes an option for a further gain, each sale cancels all those options -- not to mention taxes). We are unused to watching winners run in stocks because in the past with manufacturing, trade, and transportation, you had to deploy real capital, build plants, survive business cycles to grow massively, and you could never grow fast. Today a couple techie kids can gin up a company out of bottletops, and make a billion over night. Are we smart enough to pick the eventual winners and stick to them through thick or thin? Go back and look at Intel and see if you could have ridden that horse through the 70's and 80's. Look at Dell in its dark days. Holding Intel this last two years has been an act of faith for many people. We've seen the scoffers come and go, one put at a time. We've seen terrible things happen to our company, and it survive. I been literally sick with fear and loss during some terrible drops. Only my trust in some of you, much richer, much more knowledgeble, much stronger in the Intel faith, has made me buy with borrowed money at the trough. And now, by god, I'm exercising all my options and letting it all ride. Pa-rump, pa-rump, pa-rump ...and coming into the turn .... it's ... Feedlebaum, whups, Intel!!!. |
