money judgement

The eternal struggle of when to sell stocks and funds has hit home for me. While we’d like this process to be very mechanical, it’s actually very emotional, and that can be dangerous if you aren’t able to control your emotions. Here’s a simple guide to help protect yourself from making silly mistakes or becoming overly emotional (I first set out two rules, then turn them into one rule).

My story is that I’ve been planning a trip with a couple of friends to vacation through Southeast Asia, and it’s about to happen – we’re buying tickets now. One of those friends flies out frequently for work, so he knows the area relatively well, and has a made a number of friends and connections that can help us when we’re there. So, I need to free up some cash so I can buy the tickets as I keep as much as I can invested (and growing) until I need it.

Selling some portion of funds to pay for this, which I’ve been planning, so I know I have the money saved, makes the when-to-sell question quite easy. I sell when I need it, which is rule #1:

Rule 1 – Sell when you need it, not when you don’t. You invest your money for a future purpose, so you should sell when you need to take an action. Remove the environment of the market from the equation as the market doesn’t react to your specific situation.

Now, I hadn’t set a date ahead of time for selling because the plans haven’t been set in stone until a few days ago. The best way to go about this, as it removes as much emotional reaction as possible, is to pick a date as much as a week or two ahead of schedule, and set it in stone through some auto sell-by-date option. You should be able to set a sell date when setting up the sale, but in my case, I just said sell now.

To my fortune, the fund has gained a few percentage points in the last couple of days because the market seems to like the fact that a regularly scheduled FED announcement said they wouldn’t raise interest rates (and probably for a few other reasons too). Had I focused too much on this coming announcement, I may have tried to sell early because I expected bad news, or I might still not want to sell as I planned because I’m reacting to what the market did (either hold longer if I expect more gains, or hold longer because I want to recover from some loss). As you can see, I’d no longer be focused on the reason I actually want to sell, which is my trip, but instead because of expectations I have with the market – expectations that I have no control over or real way of understanding (beyond flipping a coin).

Rule 2 – Don’t plan your sale around short-term shifts in the market. The market doesn’t move around your life plans, so don’t plan around the market. This is when you get emotional because you don’t know what will happen, and worrying about short-term gains (or losses more often) will only lead you into a lose-lose situation. You already have a good reason for selling, so keep your eye on that.

Since this is a blog about removing complexity, and keeping personal finance simple, I’m stopping at 2 rules, and really it could be one rule:

2 Rules as 1: Selling is about planning, not reacting, so sell for a reason like needing the money for a specific purpose or regularly planned rebalancing (if you do this). With the exception of catastrophes (and even then probably not), don’t planning around market expectations because they will bite you in the butt.

To finish, lets assume that I let my emotions take over, and I sold based on my market expectations, and lets also assume I lost money by holding onto the fund after the announcement. Now, I’ve been scarred by this. Humans hate loss, and we do what we can to protect ourselves. Next time there is an announcement, I might feel anxious and want to sell for no reason other than avoiding a temporary loss, which actually costs me money in transaction fees to move the money around, and that’s a loss in itself.

If you go down the road of reacting to the market, the short-term market, then you’ll start to become like many of the traders I used to know who would get anxious, maybe even losing sleep, about potential loss and overconfident about gains both of which they had little control over. Even trying to predict the long term market has big risks, which is why holding the whole market is in most cases the best option (in both risk and return).