[Auntie Mame]

Here's another piece of bad advice in the article:

"If you bought a tech stock at $100.00 per share and it’s now at $4.00, you’re tempted to “wait it out.” Don’t. You’ve made a mistake. Get over it. Take a loss, pick up your marbles and move on to another game."

Now, unless you actually need the loss for your taxes, and few of us do right now, why would you sell something that's lost 96 percent of its value? It's practically worthless. The logical thing to do would be to hold onto it until it either goes up or goes bust.

Why would this writer be giving such poor advice?

[narses]

Why? No accountability. He is a mouth mover, a sock puppet. He doesn't have to deal with the real world.

[narses]

If you owned Cisco in March and took this advice, what would it have cost you?

[bvw]

Because it's (1) real money, even that pauper's $4 is still real (2) therefore it shows you respect reality (3) when you respect reality you can make money in rough and downing markets. Sell it. It costs bigtime to hold it in the emotional baggage it recalls to mind every time it shows up on the account statement.

Same as the good old advice one hears on Bob Brinker's show -- "Sell anything you're losing sleep over."

The best model, imo, for selling holdings is when that holding no longer meets the criterion for which you bought it. Say you buy a stock for a 2% dividend. Well, if they stop paying that near that level, sell it. Of course, I'm an antique for saying to buy for a dividend, ain't I?