Why Cutting Losses is Essential to a Winning Stock Trading System

By Maclin Vestor

There are some people who can buy a stock with the intention of holding it for years and years. If this is you, you look at a lower stock price as an opportunity to get it cheaper, or on sale. While this may work for some, people often times under estimate the risk of supposed blue chip companies losing very significant amounts. See GM, AIG, Ford, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers or Citibank as a few examples.

Perhaps one of the worst things about it is, not only individuals make this mistake, but these mistakes are even made by the rating agencies that are made up of groups of intelligent men and women working together for the sole purpose of rating stocks.

Now if you understand the risks, you know how to read financial statements, and you invest in stocks with dividends to ensure there is no accounting fraud and company actually has money it says it does as it pays out regularly, and you still realize that a solid company could still potentially become irrelevant due to breakthrough technology, illegal activities, or sudden loss of capital, overnight, then go ahead and continue to invest this way. In fact, this is one of the things that Warren Buffet loves doing, investing in companies in a time of maximum fear that he believes has a margin of safety.

However, the average trader just doesn't have the patience to own a stock for Warren Buffet's favorite holding time... forever. The average trader doesn't even hold stock for longer than 6 months let along decades.

If you are unable to continue to buy a stock lower and have the patience to hold on forever, and analyze a company with great detail before continuing to do this, then you must have some margin of safty in another way. Perhaps one of the best ways to do this is to cut your losses short. This will prevent you from incurring large losses, and will allow you to use your money towards a more profitable investment.

It's very easy for people to not realize their mistakes and miss out on the information that they are wrong. In fact, it is a self defense mechanism in our brains to defend our existing beliefs, even if we are shown all the evidence in the world against it. Rather than defend some idea that a stock will go up even when it's gone down, it's better to just cut losses short. You can make it a rule to sell the next trading day after a stock closes 8% below your purchase price. Rather than defend your stock, you can instead defend your trading system. Now if short term stocks seem to be bouncing just below 8% then climbing afterward, you will know that your system works so you will ignore any occasional losses that will happen, since you will have faith in your system of good money management, proper exit strategy and other important factors.

If you fail to cut losses short, you can often time lose far more than you set out for, which will not only hurt your portfolio, but it will also prevent you from being able to invest as much, and your ability to earn from future investments will be hinder more than it should be. Therefore, you must cut your losses short if you expect to make money in stocks and prevent yourself from incurring losses you are unable to manage. - 23208

About the Author:

Maclin Vestor teaches about how to develop a trading system and teaches you how to hedge.