Investment manager Devina Mehra offers strategies for selling (and holding) stocks in her book

Almost any book on investing will have chapters, explanations, equations and analysis – pages of them – explaining how you should pick stocks for investing. In other words, it is all about what you should buy for your portfolio. It is the same with videos or courses on investing, or for that matter, with most of the airtime on business channels.

Very little is written or understood about when to sell a stock

Even when something is written about selling a stock, it is usually asking you to look for turns in the business cycle or in the company financials or valuations. Many of these involve bets about the future, which may be completely incorrect as you do not know how the company’s future may pan out.

Selling, it is implied, is even more of an art than buying. Of course, there will be some experts recommending a blind “buy and hold” or “buy and forget” strategy, usually with cherry-picked examples. Meaning they will only pick the success stories which demonstrate that holding something for ten years or twenty years has worked very well.

They will not discuss what happened to all the other companies or stocks that an investor would have bought at the...

Read more