Sitting on a 35 percent loss can be acceptable depending on what...

Sitting on a 35 percent loss can be acceptable depending on what percentage was allocated from total available trading funds. Having say 10 percent on FMG means 3.5 percent total capital loss. That is not too bad, especially with two 6-month dividends include to offset the loss. It gets even better if the other 90% of trading capital is in strong rising stocks like CSL, APT, REA, COH, BSL, etc.

The drawback with mining stocks is that while they often strongly trend, they also run in cycles. Unfortunately for FMG at present there is a large amount of overhead supply. There are lots of traders sitting on large losses that would be grateful even to just break even. Short rallies are quickly sold into. Also, FMG doesn't have institutional fund manager backing, at least not yet.

The challenge with investing is what we usually think a company should be doing is often the opposite to what the share price is actually doing. That is why I use basic chart trend following to force me to trade certain stocks that are going up.