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Robyn Ruder
My mutual friend has a nearly new iPad 32GB wi-fi only (1st generation) for sale with a few scratches on the back. They will be giving it to me for $130 but i'm wondering if its still worth buying the first generation? I would only use it for watching youtube, netflix, hulu, hbogo, and a few games like Orba, cut the rope, and storing my music library. I have owned every iPad in the past but recently my 4th generation got stolen, so i miss having an iPad so I want to buy this one in the mean time for when I get another iPad at the end of the year. I'm just worried that since its kind of old apps will crash a lot?
iPad first generation goes up to iOS 5.1.1, so you'll be able to use iCloud and stuff. I think you're able to run most apps and do most things you'd like to do on an iPad 1 if you give it a clean restore and start fresh.
One of my Grandsons has a 1st generation that he bought from a trusted friend. It had been upgraded to iOS 5.1.1 I believe. He had no problems getting and playing games and apps for it. So, if you trust this mutual friend, you should buy it. try to get him to come down a few bucks, it doesn't hurt to try.
Right after the event, I felt shocked and depressed. I've been engaging in stocks for about a year now but I've never encountered such a big jump in such a short time. What I'm planning to do is just wait for it to rise again, which I'm not sure when. (Well, who is?)
I understand that there are already lots of questions regarding When should I sell? or Should I set a stop loss? For me, this question is not 100% about how to protect your money, but it's more of In extreme cases like this, how should I mentally prepare myself?
I anticipate that there will be comments/answers like "we can't give advice if we don't know the exact stock in topic" or somewhere along those lines. I want to pre-emptively tackle this and say that this question is not only for my specific current case. I'd prefer answers to be generic for everyone facing the same problem.
You must assume your losses are sunk costs. No matter what action you take, you can not recover your losses. Do not attempt to hold the stock in the hopes of regaining value, or sell it to stop losses. Instead approach this event as if this very day, you were given shares of the company's stock at their current market value for free as a gift. In this hypothetical situation, would you hold the shares, or sell them? Use that to judge your options.
Not everyone, myself included, can handle the mental stress of watching share prices change. You can always consider trading index funds instead, which are much less volatile but will provide consistent, albeit, boring returns. This may or may not be you, but it's an option.
First: do you understand why it dropped? Was it overvalued before, or is this an overreaction to some piece of news about them, or about their industry, or...? Arguably, if you can't answer that, you aren't paying enough attention to have been betting on that individual stock.
Assuming you do understand why this price swing occurred -- or if you're convinced you know better than the folks who sold at that price -- do you believe the stock will recover a significant part of its value any time soon, or at least show a nice rate of growth from where it is now? If so, you might want to hold onto it, risking further losses against the chance of recovering part or all of what is -- at this moment -- only a loss on paper. Basically: if, having just seen it drop, you'd still consider buying it at the new price you should "buy it from yourself" and go on from here. That way at least you aren't doing exactly what you hope to avoid, buying high and selling low. Heck, if you really believe in the stock, you could see this as a buying opportunity...
On the other hand, if you do not believe you would buy it now at its new price, and if you see an alternative which will grow more rapidly, you should take your losses and move your money to that other stock. Or split the difference if you aren't sure which is better but can figure out approximately how unsure you are.
On the gripping hand: This is part of how the market operates. Risk and potential reward tend to be pretty closely tied to each other. You can reduce risk by diversifying across multiple investments so no one company/sector/market can hurt you too badly --- and almost anyone sane will tell you that you should diversify -- but that means giving up some of the chance for big winnings too. You probably want to be cautious with most of your money and go for the longer odds only with a small portion that you can afford to lose on.
If this is really stressing you out, you may not want to play with individual stocks. Mutual funds have some volatility too, but they're inherently diversified to a greater or lesser extent. They will rarely delight you, but they won't usually slap you this way either.
From some of your previous questions it seems like you trade quite often, so I am assuming you are not a "Buy and Hold" person. If that is the case, then have you got a written Trading Plan? Considering you don't know what to do after a 40% drop, I assume the answer to this is that you don't have a Trading Plan.
Before you enter any trade you should have your exit point for that trade pre-determined, and this should be included in your Trading Plan. You should also include how you pick the shares you buy, do you use fundamental analysis, technical analysis, a combination of the two, a dart board or some kind of advisory service? Then finally and most importantly you should have your position sizing and risk management incorporated into your Plan.
If you are looking to hang on and hoping for the stock to recover, remember with a 40% drop, the stock will now need to rise by 67% just for you to break even on the trade. Even if the stock did recover, how long would it take? There is the potential for opportunity loss waiting for this stock to recover, and that might take years. If the stock has fallen by 40% in a short time it is most likely that it will continue to fall in the short term, and if it falls to 50%, then the recovery would need to be 100% just for you to break even.
Leave your emotions out of your trading as much as possible, have a written Trading Plan which incorporates your risk management. A good book to read on the psychology of the markets, position sizing and risk management is "Trade your way to Financial Freedom" by Van Tharp (I actually went to see him talk tonight in Sydney, all the way over from the USA).
Tangentially-related to the question of whether Wall Street types deserve their compensation packages is the yearly phenomenon in which actively managed mutual funds underperform the market. Between 2004 and 2008, 66.21% of domestic funds did worse than the S&P Composite 1500. In 2008, 64.23% underperformed. In other words, if you had a fund manager and his employees bringing their skill and knowledge to bear on your portfolio, you probably lost money as compared to the market as a whole. That's not to say you lost money in all cases. Just in most.
The math is really simple on this one. Stock picking is fun, but undiversified and brings you competing with Wall Streeters with math Ph.Ds. and twenty-thousand-dollars-a-year Bloomberg terminals. What do you know about Apple's new iPhone that they don't?
Hopefully, before you invested in this stock, you evaluated the company. You looked at the financial information about the company and where the company was headed, and evaluated whether the stock was undervalued or overvalued. Hopefully, you determined that the stock was undervalued at the time you bought it.
The thing to do now is to reevaluate the stock. Do you think the stock is overvalued or undervalued right now? If you didn't own it, would you buy it today? Instead of looking at the past performance of the stock, you want to try to determine which direction the stock will go from today. If you wouldn't buy it today at it's current price, then you should sell.
If you have no idea how to do this evaluation, neither do I. For me, with the investing knowledge I have right now, investing in an individual stock would be way too risky. If you don't know how to evaluate a stock and determine if it is a good buy or not, then you should stay away from individual stocks and instead invest in stock mutual funds, which lower the risk by diversifying over lots of stocks.
This could be an opportunity to harvest the tax losses to offset taxable gains this year or in future years. Unless I have compelling reasons to believe that the price will recover by at least (Loss% x ApplicableTaxRate) in the next 31 days then I would take the known - IRS tables - opportunities over the unknown.
Is this the most likely place to earn a good return on my money and is it contributing to a strategy that fits my risk tolerance? You might need to get some emotional distance from the pain to make this determination objectively.
As you consider your trading and investment strategy going forward consider that when it hurts and you have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps to think clearly about your situation, you were most likely trading with too much size for you in that particular position. I'm willing to make exceptions to that rule of thumb, but it's a good way to use the painful losses as a gut check on how your strategy fits your real situation.
Brought down my average cost per share, and when the company was taken private, I actually didn't lose money - unlike some other people I know, who only bought at one price, watched the drop, and held on awaiting a recovery (which didn't happen in time before the big money swooped in on it).
If you find that you are unable to objectively value the stock, sell it off. By closing the position you will not necessarily get the best possible price. But by removing a stressful distraction you will significantly reduce the risk of making some expensive mistakes in the near future.
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