I liked this quote from a post of yours: "What you paid for the stock is irrelevant to its current value. "
It is easy to get wrapped up in the "But I've lost too much money" mindset.
When it comes to positions in your account, yesterday doesn't matter. Only today and tomorrow do.
If you can't honestly *expect* (not "hope") a position in your account will be worth more in the future than it is today, you have no choice but to sell. What you paid for the position is irrelevant to this decision.
My past brokerage statements have hundreds of positions I've sold at a loss but consider somewhat "winning" trades because I sold before the losses got deeper and deployed the funds elsewhere where I could recoup the losses.
If I'm in a stock that's worth $5 a share right now, but I paid $10 a share for it and $4 per share looks far more likely in the future than $6 per share, I'd sell and put the funds in other stocks that I've determined, through good research and the application of critical thinking skills (as well as availing myself of the advice of people who are experts in areas I'm ignorant of, such as TA), are more likely than not to go up.
I don't ask myself "But what if the stock goes back to the $10 I paid for it?". What I paid for it is irrelevant. What it's worth now and what it'll be worth tomorrow is all that matters.
Not only that, the loss I incur in that first stock will offset the gains I make in the replacement one(s), which makes me happier at tax time.
To use a real-life example that happened to me, I bought CHTR pre-IPO then continued to buy it (dollar-cost averaging) for several months. It stayed very stable for a very long time, so I quit buying it, considered it a "core" position, and started margining (borrowing money) against it to increase the buying power I was working with for daytrading.
I largely ignored the position until a margin call woke me up. They have a way of doing that. A broker's version of a double-espresso.
When I checked, the stock had tanked to $15 and I had an average cost of closer to $18.
I sold all of it and deployed the money elsewhere. Some into stocks that did better; some into "toys" like my backhoe.
If I looked at it from the perspective of how much I paid for it versus what I sold it for, I lost an enormous amount of money. And since I did very well that year in trading, the loss on that one helped offset a lot of gains.
The stock climbed a little bit after I sold, but I had zero regrets. By the time it had, I'd made more money elsewhere than CHTR's gains during that time would've made me. And was able to use the CHTR loss to essentially erase a lot of my gains at tax time.
Keep in mind I'd bought this stock everywhere from $12 to $20 and I had a lot of money wrapped up in it. While I was ignoring it, it had "stabilized" in the $22-$23 area, so I felt pretty comfortable margining it.
It's trading today at 83 cents. If I'd held the position, not only would I not have the backhoe, my position wouldn't put many tanks of fuel into it.
If you look at this chart, you can tell where I was buying it, how long I held it as a core position and margined it, where I sold, and how much hurt I would've endured had I not had the huevos to sell it at a huge loss.
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