Given the theme for this month has been about doing less, this will be a shorter post
First off, I just wanted to say thank you. I had a fantastic amount of feedback last month, mostly on the subject of stop losses and when to sell. This was all really useful, and thanks again to all who contributed to the discussion. The consensus was that my 5% for conservative, 10% for balanced and adventurous, 15% for speculative was too tight, so with that in mind, I held my breath, and hoped none would hit those stop loss rules before I had a chance to tweek them
Things were looking good, until the 10th, when Abcam had a really bad day. I did a bit of digging, and it looked like all of this was due to the company’s preliminary results which, to me, didn’t look like bad news. While I try not to let myself make any decisions, I decided that this felt like a market over reaction to news that wasn’t as fantastic as it had expected. I therefore kept an eye on it over the following few days, only to see it regain most of its lost value. Woohoo!
Then came IGG. The first fall on results, to me looked similar to Abcam, only that these were a little more serious due to the extra regulation the company is facing, which might cut into its core business. However, it still seemed like a great company, and it was only a bit below its stop loss, and I’d already agreed that these were likely too tight. I left it a couple of days to give it time to recover, only to see it tank on the director resigning. I’m now down 26%
On the train the other day, I was having a long debate with myself about what to do. On the one hand, my stop loss rules said to sell it ages ago, and so it is my fault for not following them. On the other hand, I’d agreed with myself to be a little lenient with the stop loss rules given the feedback I’d had. But this was more than a little bit below my rules, it was well below my rules now. Then again, if you look at the company, it has a SR of 96, great…
Based on the feedback, I am going to extend my stop losses to 10% for conservative, 15% for balanced and adventurous, and 20% for speculative.
My approach occasionally selects about 20 - 25% speculative stocks and my preference for all of my stocks is to use a stop that is based around Ichimoku cloud support which is typically about a 10% stop loss BUT
I buy as the price is breaking out or setting new highs.In other words if a Speculative stock is going to be volatile I'd prefer to be loading the dice (in terms of price momentum) towards positive volatility and if it starts to go the wrong way I'd prefer to get out early.
When a stock his a stop loss I just say to myself that ...
- I don't need to win on every position
- This candidate ...
- is a false positive OR
- I got my timing wrong
That doesn't mean my approach is right for you but I'm happy with how it works for me at this time.
Best of luck
Phil
P.S. In one of my accounts I've lost 11.5% between Jul 1st & Oct 1st. There are always going to be drawn downs. It's been a tricky year. It feels as if we're in the doldrums with no strong wind in either direction.
