LLY has been a laggard for 25 years, now it’s another DELL.
Long-term Buy & Hold
As long as you’re sure that what you’re doing is beating the S&P 500, congratulations.
I’ve found that sales are more likely to be mistakes than holding for the long-term. And it’s especially punishing selling a position with a large unrealized capital gain, but “you do you”.
intercst
I don’t understand your comment at all. Sure CSCO might be a laggard, so in that case it is likely that he IS selling it. He retired in 1994, so he may have bought CSCO at $2 or $5 or thereabouts. CSCO is now $60-something, and it is indeed a laggard. But you can’t sell it all at once, that’ll cause a MASSIVE tax bill, and all that money isn’t needed right now anyway. But maybe 4% of the shares are sold each year, and in 25 years it’ll be gone from the portfolio. That IS selling the laggards!
I think there is BIG mindset difference when the vast majority of your money is in tax-deferred/free accounts versus in taxable accounts. One can trade freely in tax-deferred/free accounts, not so in taxable accounts.
VBK (the growth one) is only 0.56%!
That’s great, but I’d be realizing a 7-figure capital gain to switch to VBK, so I’ll suffer the 1.71% dividend for now.
intercst
Yep. Same as my switch from VTI to BRK, I managed to switch some of it, but not all of it.
You have no clue whether he is selling it or not. You are making all your arguments on assumptions. I am telling you it should have been gone a long time ago.
It was never 2 dollars or 5 dollars. It IPO’d at 18 dollars.
Since 2000 that is 25 years. You are just trying to make excuses so that you can defend your position but we both know that it should have been gone a long time ago. The only reason he still owns it is because he is one of those amateurs that has no idea of what he is doing. In fact if you ask him now he will tell you that it gets a dividend. The same excuse he gave for LLY.
I don’t care how you guys invest but if you want to tell people you have found a superior way of investing you really need to show how it can be superior. Because what you are showing is not that.
This discussion was all about timing. Whether someone could get in and out of the market and back in . I think if you followed my posts I have proven that is possible. No funny numbers, no YTD, just From the top of the market to the bottom and then back up. Yes it is possible and I showed it through my posts.
FWIW, Germany‘s DAX just printed a new ATH, above 24000.
Hmm…
DB2
I don’t think you understood the comment. I’ll break it down a little more for you. The point is that while laggards are sola, not ALL shares of laggards are sold at once. Yes, it might be advisable to sell CSCO, but if you bought CSCO at $2-5 and it is now $60, and you don’t want to take such a bad tax hit, you don’t sell all of it, you sell some of it each year, or at least each year that it remains a laggard.
I also don’t think you understand how discussions work. It doesn’t matter whether he is selling or not, it is an EXAMPLE for the discussion of how one can be selling their laggards each year, yet not selling the ENTIRE position of a laggard all at once.
I’ll repeat here -
I think there is BIG mindset difference when the vast majority of your money is in tax-deferred/free accounts versus in taxable accounts. One can trade freely in tax-deferred/free accounts, not so in taxable accounts.
When someone is retired, and solely living off their savings, your expenses include housing, food, transportation, travel, leisure activities, taxes, fees, etc. So, if you start with spending about 4% of your savings each year, you will sell roughly 4% (indexed to inflation of course) on average each year. Yes, you will probably create a short-term fixed income cushion of a few years (@intercst uses 10 years) of expenses to avoid selling in a down market. But in general you sell some of the equities each year as necessary to maintain the short-term fixed income cushion you are comfortable with. But if you suddenly decide to sell a bunch of stock (or a bunch of index funds) and realize a huge capital gain, suddenly your expenses that year go WAY UP. Because taxes are one of your expenses. Obviously if you own a stock that is worse than a laggard, it is showing signs of approaching failure, then it is a different story. In those cases, you might choose to sell it all and take the tax hit, so you can preserve at least some of the capital.
LOL, this is hilarious (I really chuckled)!!! You should probably look up how splits affect stock prices and what “split adjusted price” means. Or you could very easily look at any online chart of CSCO since the 1990s (when it was purchased).
Dear Andy,
You are correct on all counts.
Money comes and goes. Changing up is the science of investing.
Dear Mark,
Market conditions and corporate lifespan matter more than taxes.
I got my parents out of this market in their mid 80s about three months ago. Preservation of capital made that a must.
LOL Mark you said it was 2 dollars. You very specifically said 2 dollars. The precise wording would have been 2 dollars split adjusted, sorry if I am being pedantic. 
That is why I called you out on it. Even a child knows how splits work Mark but you, obviously, think that it is some arcane fact that only a few Market Makers know about. 
The horse is dead. Stop beating it.
This is usually true EXCEPT when comparing to current prices. Because comparing a non split adjusted price to a current price is non-sensical. The way I got my rough numbers is exactly that - I went to google and typed “csco chart”, then I clicked “max”, and then scrolled around the mid 90s (when it was purchased) to get a buy price range and scrolled around this year to get a sell price range. You see anything about “split adjusted” in this chart? No. That’s because it is implicit.
And not only that, but you are also absolutely wrong in the first place. If someone had bought 1000 shares of XYZ at $10 and later XYZ split 2:1, now he has 2000 shares. And he did indeed pay $5 for each of those 2000 shares.
I am not beating the horse, I am trying to kill the flies.
Not at all here is a table of all the prices going back to 2000.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/history/?frequency=1mo&period1=946684800&period2=1747699200
Use this exact table, but go back to the mid-90s and tell us what price it shows for Jan 1, 1995 and Jan 1, 1996.
[EDIT: I’ll add it here since you don’t want to look.
Well look at that! Exactly as I originally said roughly between $2 and $5]
I have read very few posts of yours. But what I have seen is mostly, your gut feel, and not some sort of rule based moving in and out. If it is just gut based, you should view that as a non-repeatable process that has benefitted from luck.
I am happy to learn your process of timing.
That is because you haven’t listened to what I have been actually doing. You have been stuck trying to prove how smart you are. I suggest you listen more and argue less.
I was not proving anything.. Why this hostility?
