Exit strategy?

[Anonymous No.741993]

I started with funds and stocks because I inherited a small portfolio that my grampa set up for me. Now he wasnt a banker or such, just a more or less average guy, that however understood that you gotta do someting with your money. So he was more or less a buy-and-hold guy, and over the dozens of years, it served him quite well.

So when I got started, I mostly followed his footsteps, buying low- to mid-risk stuff, and forgetting about it.

But over the last year, due to a "career change" I got more active, and found fun in investing, and came to the conclusion that I should get more active, to get higher returns.

But I just buy riskier stuff, and be happy whenever I look at my account, and made another few hundred…

However during the last days, I didnt make anything, but rather lost quite a bit. And it seems to look rahter shit in general, for the next months. So i am really tempted to sell everything, and wait it out.

And i realized I should probably really have sold some other stuff earlier. Having stuff like 30% or even 80% return on a stock during a year is something one probably should just take home? But on the other hand, had i sold my 80% apple stuff at 30%, I'd be mad every day after the sale.

How do I get started to develop my exit strategy?

[Anonymous No.741995]

>>741993

I suggest you sell everything, keep it in a savings account, and start learning about investing before you piss away everything your grandfather earned for you.

You clearly have no fucking clue what you're doing and its only a matter of time before you lose it all if you keep going like this.

[Anonymous No.741998]

>>741995
>You clearly have no fucking clue what you're doing and its only a matter of time before you lose it all if you keep going like this.
The buying part I already figured out, its the selling I am struggling with.
Also, most of my money is still in low-ish risk stuff and quite diverse, so statistically, it ought to increase anyways over the coming years.
I am just talking about a small part of my "fortune".

[Anonymous No.742003]

OP you sound completely clueless so even if we gave you an exit strategy chances are you wouldnt be able to follow it.

The most common one is sell when the price has reached a point where you wouldn't buy it anymore. OR if you see a better investment elsewhere.

[Anonymous No.742005]

>>741993
Exit strategy for retards though:

Set a stop loss 50-200% above the standard volatiliy for the stock.

Say apples volatiliy is probably +-3% so your stop loss at current levels should be set at around 122.

[Anonymous No.742007]

>>742005
But if you are investing in some volatile shit like SDRL your stop loss should give the stock much more room to volatile. Else you risk getting shaken out with the trend still going your way.

[Anonymous No.742008]

>>741993
>more active to get higher returns
Yeah, no. That's not how investing works, what you want to do is speculating, and you'll probably piss it all away.

[Anonymous No.742018]

>>742003
>OP you sound completely clueless so even if we gave you an exit strategy chances are you wouldnt be able to follow it.
Obviously I dont want a simple 1., 2., 3. Profit! thing to follow 100%, but rather some pointers about what various folks are doing, to understand and develop something of my own.

And yes, I understand that there is no simple strategy that works for everything. Of course Aplle and Seadrill are totally different things.

>>742008
"more active" as in: putting a certain amount of money in stocks of companies where I am of the opinion that they will increase in their value by a significan amount and following them, vs. just putting everything in a low risk managed fund, and waiting for 30 years.

[Anonymous No.742022]

>>742018

>develop something of my own.
>putting a certain amount of money in stocks of companies where I am of the opinion that they will increase in their value by a significan amount

Listen carefully here OP. These are not realistic expectations. This is going to do nothing but cost you money.

You are not an expert on stock trading, nor will you realistically become one within the next 10 years.

Please don't piss away your grandfather's money on some pipedream of getting rich by investing.

[Anonymous No.742025]

>>742018
>"more active" as in: putting a certain amount of money in stocks of companies where I am of the opinion that they will increase in their value by a significan amount and following them, vs. just putting everything in a low risk managed fund, and waiting for 30 years.
That was your first mistake, dummy. Since you are unwilling to accept the consequences of your decision to add more risk, maybe you shouldn't be adding more risk.

[Anonymous No.742031]

>>742022
Those are perfectly realistic expectations if OP applies himself. This shit doesn't take 10 years to learn, and having 140k puts him at a significant capital advantage. Stop drinking the kool-aid. You've gone way past "put it in index funds until you know better" and deep in to "people don't get rich by owning".

Yeah, /biz/ is not the place you want to ask that shit. I don't know why people keep popping on here thinking someone will mentor them, but at the very least, stop spreading misinformation like "getting rich by investing" is a "pipedream".

[Anonymous No.742036]

>>742022
>Listen carefully here OP. These are not realistic expectations. This is going to do nothing but cost you money.
And what else am I supposed to do? Put my money in stuff I think will decrease its value?

>You are not an expert on stock trading, nor will you realistically become one within the next 10 years.
Never said I was one or would want to become one.

>Please don't piss away your grandfather's money on some pipedream of getting rich by investing.
Again, never said I am looking for a get rich quick scheme. But - and please correct me if I am wrong - putting your money at where you think it might increase is like the underlying basic that is propelling our whole market.

As we have already established, I am no expert, thus most of my money is in "safe" stuff, and that's how I want to keep it (ETF's, managed funds, blue chips) and so far it has served me well.

But some part I just want to "play" with. The more risky some stock becomes, the less money I put into it. But I must do it with real money! All those demo accounts and stuff dont work. Those are just computer games, I'll never make the same decisions in those, as I would IRL.

And I am not trying to be a defensive asshole here. The input so far is also helping me, but I think my intentions and doings are kinda misunderstood.

[Anonymous No.742040]

>>742025
>That was your first mistake, dummy. Since you are unwilling to accept the consequences of your decision to add more risk, maybe you shouldn't be adding more risk.
Oh, but I am aware of the consequences!
And I can live with them. But just because It does not really bother me that I lost some money must not mean that I should not learn from it, and think about the next steps to take.

[Anonymous No.742041]

>>741993
Selling shit and "waiting it out" is not a good idea, especially if it's because you had a bad week.

An exit strategy is something you have in mind when you buy a security. Under what conditions do you want to sell the asset? Usually it's something like a stop loss or a trailing stop or just taking profit past a certain point. What you shouldn't do is second guess your decision. You got out for a reason. Doesn't matter if the stock kept running or rebounded.

Without knowing what's in your portfolio, you can't get much more specific than that.

[Anonymous No.742045]

>>742041
this
>>742040
Know where you're going to sell BEFORE you buy. When/if the stock gets to the target you can sell or reassess. Always use stop loss orders. Or trailing stop loss orders when you're not actively monitoring it. That could have saved your 80% gain on APPL, not all of it, but possibly 65% if that's where you would have put your stop loss.

[Anonymous No.742055]

>>742041
>Selling shit and "waiting it out" is not a good idea, especially if it's because you had a bad week.
True, but havent you never had that "oh shit, I'm out, fuck that shit!" moment?

>Usually it's something like a stop loss or a trailing stop
That's what I was investigating anyways, but unfortunately my bank does not offer that stuff.
Is there any sites that offer stuff like dummy alerts per e-mail? E.g. set up a watch list of stuff I am holding on yahoo finance or whatever, and if they alert me, I go online with my bank and sell, without thinking to much.
> or just taking profit past a certain point.
That's kinda the idea too, but I am struggling at reasonable numbers. Some blue chip ought to have a lower percentage than some hot and hyped tech stock. Investing in the next google, and then jumping out with 30% profit seems as unwise as investing into google now, and planning to hold it till reaching 200% plus.
Also it should depend on the amount of money in a certain stock?
If I invest say $100, I must wait to at least 50%, because otherwise the fees will eat my profit anyways. But still, with 100% plus, I still only made like 70$, so I might as well wait and see if I can get to 1000%. if THAT works, I finally have some money worth counting, and if it crashes, well, I just lost a few dollars, doesnt hurt me much.
But with a say, 10k investment in one thing, I certainly want to be more conservative, because a) 10% already gives me some money worth counting, and b) loosing said 10k will hurt.

[Anonymous No.742061]

>>741993
>buying low- to mid-risk stuff,
>However during the last days, I didnt make anything, but rather lost quite a bit

How do you reconcile these 2 statements? One volatile week (2 modest down days, 1 huge up day) shouldn't be enough to shake you out of a low/mid risk portfolio. We ended pretty much flat on the week.

If your investments really are low/mid risk, you wouldn't have lost "quite a bit"

My guess is OP's inherited portfolio is stuffed to the gills with over valued income investments: REIT's, mREIT's, MLP's and dividend stocks. All of which are getting torched as interest rates creep up. If this is true, OP will get blown out if rates move and have no clue what hit him.

TLDR: index funds for you buddy

[Anonymous No.742063]

>>742055
1. Yeah, I had "Oh fuck" moments when I was starting. It ended up being a bad idea. Trading on emotion never works out, which is what highlights the whole necessity of having an exit strategy.

2. If your bank doesn't offer stops, you need to get a different broker. That's fairly standard shit.

3. If you can't evaluate price targets on individual stocks, you shouldn't be trading individual stocks. If you REALLY want to say "Fuck it" until you have a better handle on the whole thing, I'd suggest buying SPY or VOO to keep yourself on par with overall market growth until you figure things out.

Like I said, without knowing whats in your portfolio, its hard to get any more specific.

[Anonymous No.742072]

>>742061
>We ended pretty much flat on the week.
>TLDR: index funds for you buddy
just that we did not. Or at least if "we" refers to the Germans.
Most of my losses are from an index fund, tracking the German DAX…

[Anonymous No.742073]

>>742031
>way past "put it in index funds until you know better"
Kek, get a load of this child. He doesn't even know the endgame. You can't go past the top tier, dummy.

>>742040
>that I lost some money must not mean that I should not learn from it
You're not learning the right lessons, apparently. You're essentially asking how to make the Titanic sink less slowly. We could tell you, but the better lesson is to get off the damn boat. Stock-picking is a ineffective and failed strategy.

>>742063
>stops
Also known as "how to stop profits." Nothing more retarded than letting temporary market forces decide what assets you own or don't own. Pleb tier shit.

[Anonymous No.742082]

>>742063
>1. Yeah, I had "Oh fuck" moments when I was starting. It ended up being a bad idea. Trading on emotion never works out, which is what highlights the whole necessity of having an exit strategy.
And that's exactly why I am trying to figure out one. Maybe was some kind of a wake up call?

>3. If you can't evaluate price targets on individual stocks, you shouldn't be trading individual stocks.
But you gotta start somewhere. As said, I dont believe in demo accounts, so I just got started to see what various things are doing, and what I can do.

>Like I said, without knowing whats in your portfolio, its hard to get any more specific.
I am not looking for some anon being my personal advisor, so I wont post my complete portfolio, and let you do my homework for me, but to discuss something at a live example, lets look at Daimler and Under Armour.

[Anonymous No.742088]

>>742072
>Most of my losses are from an index fund, tracking the German DAX…

Now this is starting to make sense. You are over concentrated in your home country. A home country that has severe macro economic problems.

Learn to allocate you assets before selecting individual securities

[Anonymous No.742089]

>>742082
So with Daimler, I dont expect huge profits in the short term. But after they have been doing a lot of shit the last years, their current offerings are looking good. However, the Chinese market (which currently rocks) is something to watch out for.

I dont expect them to fluctuate too much, so I only want them to loose 10% at maximum, whereas I also dont expect more than a 30% increase over the year even if the German rally continues. But as long as they dont show any signs of fucking up, thats a long term keeper.

Under Armour is the new kid on the block, and they are probably going to become huge, so I am going to expect them to at least go up 50% per year. But they are still new, and have to figure out quite some things, so there might be some big set backs, so I went in with a small amount of money, so that i can easily weather a 50% loss.

[Anonymous No.742094]

>>742088
>You are over concentrated in your home country.
how concentrated is over-concentrated?
But I get your point. I also got some other stuff in the US and some smaller things in Asia and Emerging markets.
And then I also have some various things I picked by their fields of business (e.g. tech stuff like apple) and I am currently working on diversifying more, to not get caught in one country/industry fucking up.
But as has been said to me here already, buying stuff is only half the part.

[Anonymous No.742097]

>>741998
>The buying part I already figured out, its the selling I am struggling with.
Kek. Buy low sell high, it's simple.

Seriously, you have no fucking idea about investing and even worse, you have delusions about actually knowing something about it. Just sell it all and stick the money in an index fund. You'll never overperform it anyways.

[Anonymous No.742102]

>>741998
If you don't know how to sell you don't know shit. You only get paid when you sell. I would assume as well you THINK you have money in low risk stocks because your broker has an index that SAYS "low-risk" and you clicked it. If you don't know how to value a company you don't know shit about fuck.

[Anonymous No.742111]

>mfw people here think index funds are "low risk"
It's like watching apes assemble an airplane.

[Anonymous No.742115]

>>742082

>I am not looking for some anon being my personal advisor, so I wont post my complete portfolio, and let you do my homework for me, but to discuss something at a live example, lets look at Daimler and Under Armour.

>implying I want to do your homework

You're the one posting a thread amounting to "I fucked up". There's a lot of factors that go in to that, like the fact that you're invested in the German market. That was kind of important.

Your first priority should be to stop thinking with your gut, which goes back to the structure of a trade and knowing under what conditions you will exit the position, but apparently the same applies your perception of buying or market sentiment. You know HOW to buy, but you don't have a very good grasp of the risks involved in owning a security.

Kudos for diving in headfirst. That's better than what half the nutless wonders on /biz/ will do. You should try to pin down what you know that you don't know so that you can go read up on that.

[Anonymous No.742123]

>>742115
>implying I want to do your homework
thought so…
But just coming here and posting
>Hai /biz/, I currently own
>2k in AAPL
>.5k in SDRL
>and so on
>now, plz tell me what to do with it
would have certainly looked worse, than what I did instead.

>You know HOW to buy, but you don't have a very good grasp of the risks involved in owning a security.
I certainly dont have a 100% grasp of everything, but I think it boils down to the fact that securities can also go down, and not just "to the moon!!1!!", to use a common /biz/ term. But sure, I must learn more about quantifying how much and how likely that "down" is, for a specific stock or index, and what might be causing it.

>You should try to pin down what you know that you don't know so that you can go read up on that.
That's what I am in the process of doing constantly, time allowing for it. That's also something I am currently working on. How much (and what) can I actually do actively with my money due to time constraints from having a "normal" job for my daily expenses and such.

I might be sounding very defensive, but all input so far is really appreciated!

[Anonymous No.742128]

>>742111
>mvq Dqnl27bt doesn't know what risk actually is

[Anonymous No.742130]

>>742123
Two way street, that is. The less you put out there, the more generic the stuff that anyone can tell you. You say something like you lost quite a bit, and that's a very relative term. 5%? 10%? 25%? 50%? Depending on how much risk you are carrying that may just be noise or it may be an issue of loading up on something very very stupid, like a triple leveraged inverse fund with crazy high built in decay. It may be something you pass off as "well, that's stupid, of course I wouldn't do that", but we have people come in here barking about how /pol/ told them the happening was on and everyone should load up on shit like UVXY.

>I certainly dont have a 100% grasp of everything, but I think it boils down to the fact that securities can also go down, and not just "to the moon!!1!!", to use a common /biz/ term. But sure, I must learn more about quantifying how much and how likely that "down" is, for a specific stock or index, and what might be causing it.

Technically, they can also do nothing, which is why when you evaluate a trade you should also include a time frame. Usually just how long you plan on holding it, or at least how long until you re-evaluate the performance.

Part of that whole evaluation process is having at least a general idea not only how far up or down the asset may move, but also the probability range of the outcomes.

As you're aware, blue chips don't have as wide a range, but also are fairly dependable in not suddenly sinking. Higher risk stuff may shoot up +50%, but they're also far more likely to sink -90% because some clinical study or lawsuit or something didn't have a favorable outcome. Look up Sharpe Ratios if you're evaluating the risk of a portfolio.

Something else to keep in mind is that handling assets is not something you can just trial and error your way through. There are far more ways to fuck up than to succeed, and people have gone broke trying to figure it out.

[Anonymous No.742132]

>>742130
The fact that you're willing to ask and are trying to actually learn says a lot though.

[Anonymous No.742140]

>>742130
>Depending on how much risk you are carrying that may just be noise
Probably. However it was the first time that really everything I have dropped. Normally my diversification works quite well, and I always have some winners left at the end of the day. At the end, it was only around 5% in total, but still, looking at your account, and having a red minus at all your daily gains is not a nice thing to see.
>or it may be an issue of loading up on something very very stupid, like a triple leveraged inverse fund with crazy high built in decay.
I am mostly staying away from that stuff. Sure, its tempting that make quite a load of money with very small sums and a 10x lever, but, yeah, no…

>Something else to keep in mind is that handling assets is not something you can just trial and error your way through. There are far more ways to fuck up than to succeed, and people have gone broke trying to figure it out.
While it certainly is no 100% sure way of getting out of this "adventure" in the green, I'd say with my current "strategy" of having most stuff in rather conservative funds and only "playing" with small amounts of money, without complicated shit like leveraged products, I'm not to bad off. Comparing my portfolio with an index consisting out of 50% Dax and 50% S&P500 it doesnt look too bad.
But I dont want to take this as granted.

[Anonymous No.742199]

>>742094
Can you draw a markowitz bullet or should we do that for you too? You understand variance, right? You know how to decrease portfolio variance?

[Anonymous No.742922]

>>741993
OP. It's no big, just read up on some investing books. Get to know your stocks.
Learn chart-patterns.
Learn to read SEC filings.
Learn hype, factors in stock prices, etc.