I get fixated on “not selling at a loss”
Chris this is two of the deadly psychological sins of bad investing: price anchoring and loss aversion.
Many studies have shown that people would much rather avoid a $5 loss than miss a $10 gain. They have done this study in many ways with people and monkeys.
Price anchoring is getting a certain price in your head and believing that means something when it does not. In this case it is your purchase price.
People like Saul and Buffett are more successful than most because they have “de-humaninzed” investing. They have taken out these emotions and psychological weaknesses. Not many can successfully do this. David Gardner also does it his system.
We all need to make sure we have a SYSTEM* that we can use successfully, otherwise we have zero chance of beating the market. The best system for success for most people is to just put all your money in cheap index funds and put new money in from every paycheck. You NEVER sell the indexes until you are preparing some safe money for retirement. You will match the market and beat almost everyone you know who is “smarter”. With 10-15 years before retirement you should be able to beat the market (S&P500) easily. This is because small and mid-cap stock outperform large caps over time. People think they are risky becuase they move up and down more, but that is NOT a risk, that is volatility. When you near retirement you put aside some “safe” money to avoid the only risk there is, that money you expected to be there when needed is not there. To beat the market then, you could put 50% in S&P and split the other 50% between things like the VOE, IVOO, S&P 400 small growth. You might even put it all in an equal wieghted S&P fund like the RSP.
Another “easy” system is what David Gardner does, buys good grwoth stocks that have long term potential and then never sells them. Sometimes the Rule Breakers or Stock Advisor sells, but DG says in his podcasts he never does. Losers just become a tinier piece of his portfolio. So for me, I am taking park of my money and going to invest in every DG stock from SA and RB as they are announced. That is 3 stocks a month. I have decided I will do this for the next 2 years (24 months = 72 stocks). Yes that is a lot, but they are equal weighted and they are generally small to mid cap and will outperform the S&P 500 over the 5 or more years I will hold them. This also averages me in over 2 years of market oscillations. That is a system that relieves me from all thinking. I know some will tank and some will be 5 or maybe 10 baggers to more than make up for it. But I will not worry about buy or selling or how much. My system is set and it prevents my emotions or psyche from interferring. (FYI, when I was doing Stock Advisor, I only bought the stocks I liked and sold stuff if it tanked. My scorecard showed I was underperforming. If I had bought equal amounts of all recs and never sold I am convinced I would be doing much better).
Another system is what Saul does, but that that requires a good amount of work and faith in yourself. You can’t just buy and sell on his coattails because he is not running a servcie to tell you exactly when and what he does. You really have to put in the time. In fact, I would like to see the board do a prediction thread in the middle of each month. Use your knowledge of his system to guess what he has done in the 15 days since he revealed his end of month holdings. This is to see how well you and the board members are learning his system. I think Saul would hate this and ask you not to do it 
Whatever system you choose, it is imperitive that it prevents you from doing dumb emotional and psychological things violate your system. Until you can do that, you should only be in index funds.
*DG talks about this in his Rule Breaker podcasts, which are great sources of wisdom and confidence building. I highly recommed the 20 minutes or so it takes each week.
…Just the ramblings of a Puddin’head
