When I started investing five years ago on Sharebuilder, the plan was to be a buy-and-hold investor. What I didn’t realize is that buy and hold investing isn’t a wise strategy for companies that are extremely volatile and killing your gains.
My stock portfolio (not counting index funds over at Vanguard and my IRAs/401k) is currently $58k, which is not a fortune, but also nothing to shake a stick at. Increasing that 10% a year is great, losing 30% a year is not so great. My stock portfolio has gone up, and down, and up and down, and down, and down, and up again. It’s now up 8.6%, with a few big losers, and a few winners to date. The biggest winner — no shock — is Apple.
The biggest loser is Comverge, which I originally bought for $18 a share and dollar cost averaged down to $1.65, where it is today. While I haven’t thrown Comverge out the window yet (after losing $4.5k, I prefer to let it live on as a paper loss instead of admitting defeat), today I decided it was time to get rid of one stock that has been sharply trending downward. Continue reading Sold My First Stock: OSTK