You are beating yourself up and getting all emotional. There is no point in looking at what "could have" happened. That is history. At any given point in time, it is difficult at best to determine what to do. Because of the magic of statistics and data smoothing, the curves all look very smooth after the fact. What was once a sharp upward spike becomes a nice smooth curve. You will have yourself telling yourself that you could have/ should have sold at the very apex. Don't bother with it. It is a waste of time.
You bought with your emotions and now your emotions are your worst enemy. I can't tell you what to do. When I considered posting this, the stock was at .15 and seemed to be stable. It is once again doing it's typical thing. It levels out for awhile, then falls again. This is because (according to a textbook) there 4 types of traders in the market:
- buy and hold
- ST traders (?) not sure of this one..
- profit-takers (selling)
- arbitragers.
At any rate, stocks will always have temporary reprieves on a downward slide. It is the ST traders buying low, then taking profits. It did the ">" pattern thing, now it appears to have collapsed again.
Your mistake is in using the word "bottom". There is no "bottom", in most cases, until the company is profitable. Nothing sustainable anyway. This is where Mr. Hernandez is having trouble as well.
Consider another approach, one which you may consider "backwards". No matter what your emotions are telling you, set financial criteria and then use them to find a list of matching stocks, then let your emotions go to work on those. Simply discount the losers.
Here is what I did up until a year ago, using a stock screening tool:
- find all stocks in a sector of your choosing on a certain market and rank them by revenue growth. (I found over a 3 year period to be the best)
- Start checking them out from the top down. You have automatically selected the single best criteria (revenue growth) and made it the most important contributor to your success. It can be misleading (a company can be a raw startup and have amazing revenue growth... )
- Look at the chart. Buy a book on charting. I can't explain it here. If it is downward, don't consider it further (usually). Level and stable is good.
- You should have a small group of stocks now that interest you. Now let your emotions go to work. Do they have a business idea that you beleive in/ like... think there is massive profit potential.
- now there is a host of things.. usually if they have negative eps they are not ready yet, watch them.
- does the chart represent a buying opportunity?
- I usually check out the financials further then. I use investing.businessweek.com. It gives you a little histogram for every Line Item. You can see a problem at a glance.
- you want to catch them just as they become proftiable... sometimes before.
- seasonality is important. Mid-Dec is perfect.
- I have tried using other criteria, like eps, P/E, etc. They just muddle things up. You find the best stocks right around 0 eps. They are almost there.
The point is, don't get into a uWink in the first place. So, you are in at .19. Perhaps, if you apply yourself using a methodology such as the above, you might find something with much better numbers/ criteria than uWink and decide to sell. At .15 you are looking at a 25% loss. Better than losing the entire thing.... The decision you are facing now, whether to ditch it and take the loss, is a tough one for anybody. According to Mr Hernandez, you have a 90% chance of losing everything.. consider that. Getting pissd off at him will not help you now.
AI
