| I was recently reminded of the value - and power - of protective stops. Most of our monthly advisories and trading services at The Oxford Club adhere to a time-tested protective stop strategy. That is, when we recommend a new stock, we also set a "protective stop" price - typically 25% below the entry price - at which to exit the stock. This is done to help our Members protect their principal and any gains they've made. Most of the time, these stops are trailing stops. A trailing stop follows a stock up as it rises, ensuring Club Members always know in advance exactly where we'll get out. And as I said, recently this all came home to me as I was writing about the Profit Accelerator Portfolio (a model portfolio available exclusively to Oxford Communiqué Pro subscribers). I closely monitor its holdings for the Club's Chief Investment Strategist Alexander Green. We launched the Pro level of the Communiqué in July 2022, and Alex's very first Profit Accelerator Portfolio recommendation was Plains All American Pipeline (Nasdaq: PAA), an oil and gas pipeline master limited partnership based in Houston, Texas. We recommended the stock at a price of $9.81 and set a protective stop 25% below that - around $7.35. Plains All American turned out to be a great performer for us. Including dividends, the recommendation delivered a 122% gain over almost exactly two years. And our sell stop rose with it, touching $16.50 as the stock approached its July peak of around $19. But this past August, Plains lost momentum as the price of oil drifted lower. On Halloween, the stock closed at $16.27. Since we use end-of-day prices for our stops, not intraday, this triggered a sell alert for Pro subscribers. So instead of following it further down, subscribers got out of Plains with a 94% gain, almost double the gain of the S&P 500 over that time. Here's another example... Just a few days after we exited Plains, a drop in the price of Novo Nordisk (NYSE: NVO) in our Oxford Trading Portfolio triggered the protective stop on that stock. This play delivered a 122% gain to Members over the course of two years - a return that blew the broader market's performance out of the water. Bear Market Gains There's a long history at the Club of using these sell stops to protect our profits. During the bull market that preceded the Great Recession, many investors watched as their stock portfolios soared. Yet many of these investors failed to take profits, and they had no sell discipline. That's understandable. We investors are only human, and we can get emotionally attached to our stocks (especially if they've delivered big gains for us). But therein lies the danger... Such an attachment can result in an investor watching their profits evaporate as their holdings drop in price. Sometimes gains even turn into losses. Throughout the 2008 market downturn, The Oxford Club advised that Members resist this all-too-human frailty by sticking to our proven stop strategy. The result was astonishing. In what was one of the worst years on record for the stock market, The Oxford Communiqué managed an average return of nearly 29%. As we like to say at the Club, anyone can buy a stock or publicly traded fund. The real art of investing is knowing when to sell. Invest wisely, Matt | 
No comments:
Post a Comment