re: What strategy/method do you use to determine when to exit a stock?

quote:

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rule #1 of trading: Don't make a trade an investment. Its hard but that's reality.

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+1

The hardest thing for many/most people to do (even professional traders/investors, e.g., Josh Brown and Twitter or Bill Ackman and Valeant) is admit when they're wrong. When you see people talk about a trade, and then once it goes south, they start saying things like "dollar cost average", "double down", "gotta get even again", that dog has turned into an investment. And it very seldom ends well.

I've done it myself. And so I try to use trailing stops as it moves up (or down on shorts) to protect profits, or enter (in my mind or in reality) a stop loss of X%, depending on the historical volatility of the instrument.