When the market is strong but my stock is low, when should I call it quits and sell?

The topic of this article is the answer to the following question: When the market is strong but my stock is low, when should I call it quits and sell?
Now, even the most financially-challenged person can tell you the basic idea behind succeeding in playing the stock market. You buy when stocks are low, and you sell when stocks are high. Pretty easy, right? Well, actually, thinking that it’s easy is actually pretty wrong. Even though all traders know that this is the basic idea behind playing the stock market, a lot of the time it doesn’t quite work out that way for them. Why? Because they don’t look at the really important indicators and factors that tell you when a stock is low and when a stock is high. For example, you might look at a stock that you’re thinking of buying. The price is pretty high, so you pass on it, and snap up a low priced stock instead. This could be a big mistake. Or maybe you hear about a really popular stock, so you buy it anyway. You buy it even though it’s at a high price, and you don’t research whether or not its popularity will last. This could be a big mistake. Or maybe your stock is still pretty low, still around the price you bought it, but the market is pretty strong. Should you sell your stock or not? Well, it all depends on a lot of different factors, including whether or not you are a growth investor—you want short term, high yield in vestments—or a value investor, who makes long term investments designed to pay off big sometime in the future by buying stocks that the market has forgotten.

If the market is strong, but your stock is low, then you don’t want to automatically just sell. Is just the price low, even though the rest of the stock market is going up? What about other indicators? What about its projected yield? What about volume? What about its stock chart? How is it performing in comparison to other companies in the industry? What about its PEG and P/E ratios? Its book value? Its projected earnings growth? In fact, if you do a lot of research on a stock, you might end up finding out that it would be a great stock to buy more of even though it is low and the market is high. If you examine the different fundamentals of a stock, then you might see the potential for growth, even though the actual price of the stock is low at the time, compared to the market.
So let’s say that you are holding on to a stock, but while the market is going strong, the stock drops. If the stock drops or if the stock is going slow and not rising with the rest of the market, then you need to research a certain things about the company. What is the morale of the company? What is the confidence in the leadership? How much money is the company putting towards new research opportunities and product development? What kind of growth yield is going on? Is the current performance of the stock wildly different from the history of the stock’s performance? Compare the current trends of the stock with how it has performed in the past. If you see a serious downturn compared to the stock’s previous performance? If so, then you might want to think about selling. It’s really more important to see if the stock has the potential to perform well, rather than necessarily how it is doing in comparison to the rest of the market. However, if a stock seriously falls, then you will probably want to sell as soon as you can so that you don’t lose even more money on this stock. However, if the stock is simply staying low, but you think that it has the potential to be better, then try holding onto it for a little while to see if it fulfills its potential. It’s up to you to determine how long you can wait, since that has more to do with your personal investment strategy and your own investment needs.