Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of February 12, 2013?

Article Excerpt

Deciding when to sell is the trickiest part of investing. Our genes program us to run from danger, and every day the media brings new reasons to sell. But if you sell too often or too quickly, you’ll sell a lot of your best choices way too early, and you’ll never make any serious profits. You can find numerous rules of thumb that aim to tell you when to sell. Most are based on chart-reading or technical analysis. All work at times, but none work consistently. When they fail, the profits you miss out on are likely to overwhelm any risk they help you avoid. Our rule is that you can cut way down on times when you really need to sell by consistently buying well-established, high-quality stocks. These stocks can still drop sharply when the economy falters or bad news strikes, of course. But these are the stocks that snap back quickest and most reliably when the trend reverses and bad…