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"Take Profits" vs "Buy and hold"


SaurusDNA

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I'm an investor, not a trader, so in general, I don't do short term buy and sells - I choose companies with good trends over 10 years, if possible, with the occasional wildcard such as Steinhoff (I bought a few of these at 488c).

 

I regularly try and revise my strategy and these are my two choices at the moment:

 

Option 1) Buy and hold indefinitely with a trailing stop loss at 20%.

 

Option 2) Buy and hold with a trailing stop loss at 20% and a "sell 50% of stocks at 40% profit" order, while letting the other half run.

 

I'm still reluctant about using a "take profit" order, although many say this is the way to go, and I'm still most likely going to end up choosing option (1), but I'm interested on hearing your thoughts on this.

 

Question 1) What is your opinion on "take profits" (or a portion thereof) as compared to "hold indefinitely" (for the investor, as opposed to trader), and what has worked for you?

(As an investor, I'm talking about larger margins such as 20% trailing stop loss and 40% profit-taking, not the small margins used in day to day trading.)

 

Question 2) What is your trailing stop loss percentage set at in a "buy and hold" strategy if you use stop losses? It seems the literature is split between 15% and 20% as being the optimal percentage for "buy and hold" stop losses - (Reference: https://www.quant-investing.com/blogs/general/2015/02/16/truths-about-stop-losses-that-nobody-wants-to-believe), although it is clear that the use of a wide trailing stop loss margin gives better returns than using no stop loss in "buy and hold" in the long term, provided it is 15% or larger, so wondering what you think and what has worked for you....

 

As the saying goes, "Theory guides, experiment decides.", so I'm interested in hearing what works best for investors on this forum.

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