[quote=Coronita][quote=plm][quote=Reality][quote=plm]
Actually I think that selling and buying back later at a lower prices is a way to have even better returns but much riskier since you have to time the market properly. Isn’t it safest to buy and hold and just don’t sell when they market crashes?[/quote]

What if when you need retirement income coincides with the crash?[/quote]

Well this last crash only lasted for a few months… But seriously, I have enough cash for a couple years worth of expenses and I have rental and significant dividend income as well so its unlikely I will have to sell at the bottom.[/quote]

I think Reality was referring to not just the brief crash that happened due to covid.

I think Reality was referring to a real crash like the one in 2001 which lasted for several years and which a lot of overspeculated or just nonsense high flyer companies ended up crashing to oblivion and never recovered. Many of us remember.

Index fund investments survived and recovered..Many individual stocks didn’t and many people who thought they could outsmart the indexes only thought so because they never really experienced a real life crash.

If you look at how the indexes are performing right now, it’s sort of misleading. It’s not that most of the companies that make up those indexes are all doing well this year Most of them are still negative. It’s just a few select companies in those indexes have went beserk and those few companies are making the entire index look good. Companies like AMD which is trading around $86/share even though it absolutely makes no sense.

Regarding protection. I can only speak of a large company issued stock options grant. Back then, one thing we did do to protect from a big crash was to buy out of money out options regularly. I worked for a company that priced there IPO at $30/share and opened at $217, and within that first 6 months went as high as $415/share even though we were still unprofitable. Our valuation was a $6 billion software company even though are revenue was around $50million. Made no sense whatsoever. I remember the moment put options were available, many of us were buying them when the stock price was still above $300/share just so it could protect all the unvested employee stock options that had a $30 strike price that we needed to wait 4 years to fully vest

It wasn’t long after the company stock fell to $7/share.

Retail speculators lost their shirts.

Employees got laid off.

Some employees that got laid off had a big grin on their face because suddenly their out of money put options that was insurance for their unvested company issued stock options was worth a lot of money, and they didn’t need to wait for 4 years of vesting to get that money which was almost the same as how much their company issued options would have been…

Since then, companies have gotten a lot smarter. Many have a company policy against you or a family member owning derivatives of the company stock….

Whenever things really get frothy, individual stock ownership gets a lot more risky. I think for some of these speculation, there has to be an exit strategy because it is almost impossible to be consistently have the winning hand all the time. Once you’ve reached a point of a lucky windfall that matters, it’s imho an equal amount of effort to try to preserve and prevent losing most of it, and that means finding a way to shift that money somewhere else that is less likely to lose as much as fast as you can in individual stocks.

At least that’s how I was able to afford to buy a primary SFH down here when I moved back in 2004, when housing was already pretty expensive and also getting frothy.[/quote]

Well your example implies a price/sales of 120. My highest two are Fastly and Okta which are high in the 30s and 40s. Okta just popped another 7 percent today probably because Salesforce popped 25 percent after great earnings yesterday. When these momentum stocks I own keep going up, blind greed takes over and I can’t sell. I’m even selling the few loser dividend stocks I own like CVS and buying growth tech instead, screw diversification.