Jrowl, you need to be careful about selling out in a bull market with the intention of buying back cheaper. An attempt to finesse a few extra dollars can cost you a small fortune.
It goes like this. You sell at 0.14 because you have a nice profit and you know that stocks rarely go up vertically. After selling it closes at 0.13 and you start to feel clever already. The next day it consolidates further to an intraday low of 0.11, at which point you are a genius, but it closes stronger at 0.125. You think how nice it would have been to have re-bought at 0.11, so you wait to see whether it drops back to that level the next day. On open it drops to 0.115, but closes at 0.125 again. You decide to re-buy at 0.115 or below, still a great trade after selling at 0.14.
Unfortunately gold has a big rise that night and the stock gaps back up to 0.14 bid at the opening. Feeling a pang of panic you decide that you will get back in at any price below 0.14. However, the stock gains bidders throughout the day and closes at 0.15 on the bid. Psychology is now your enemy. If you buy back in you have gone from being a master trader to a goose who threw away money needlessly, so you wait, hoping it will have just one more bad day. To your horror the stock opens the next day at 0.175. Now there is no way you can get back in without having blatantly squandered a lot of money. You are psychologically frozen, incapable of acting. You start to not look at the stock price because it is too painful.
A month goes by and the pain has receded and the rough and tumble of other stock adventures has allowed you to move on. You check the share price and your stomach drops when you see it trading at 0.42. You then notice it made a 52 week high of 0.49. The bile rises in your throat.
This is a familiar story. I've done it myself more times than I'd like to admit. I like nothing better than a sneaky finesse and have often made an easy $5k or 10k when it worked. Unfortunately I have also sold out of 10 baggers after they doubled and never got back in, for exactly the psychological reasons given above. It's very hard to admit a mistake and act purely on what you think will happen in the future, without any reference to the past.
In chess there is a type of serious mistake which is well known by expert players but hard to avoid. You move a piece to a particular square, but it was an error. After your opponent's move your best response is actually to move that piece back to where it was, with minimal harm done. Most players will tend to accept dire consequences rather than admit to the mistake and will do something else that tries to justify the mistake already made. It's human psychology. How many people call off a wedding when they realise they have made a mistake, compared to the number who simply press on and regret what they have done?
There will undoubtedly be trading opportunities in Troy and other precious metals stocks. It's a very risky thing to do though unless you are psychologically prepared to accept the evidence that you have made a mistake if the stock keeps going, and take the loss on the chin and re-enter.
Good luck. I hope you make the right decisions. There is a regular poster on this forum who has sold out and is probably already caught in the psychological vice I described. He might turn out to have made a good play, but it's unlikely in a developing bull market and I suspect it will be impossible for him to suck it up and buy back in, even though as I write the stock is only marginally higher than what he bailed at.
Sorry, this was meant as a response to the previous post, not to Terence.
