Can't lose if you don't sell?

Sell = realized event Stock can always go down further and not recover Sounds like you need to just buy index ETFs

Oversimplified as usual. Time is money... Opportunity cost is real, and inflation is a cost. Yes, you do lose to inflation when your investment does nothing. You're better to eat the loss and move your money somewhere it will grow.

Yup, I just have auto contributions and auto reinvest dividends set up and go months without even opening fidelity. It gone pretty well over the past 10 years.

No! Most stocks lose if you don't sell, winners are a tiny percentage of the entire stock market universe Hendrik Bessembinder (Arizona State University) has produced the most comprehensive long-term studies on this. His latest update covers roughly 29,000–30,000 U.S. common stocks from 1926 through 2025: * The **median** lifetime buy-and-hold return (with dividends reinvested) was negative (around –6.9%). Only about 48% of stocks delivered a positive lifetime return. * Only \~41% outperformed one-month U.S. Treasury bills over their full lives. Roughly 59% underperformed cash. * Only about 28% of stocks outperformed the value-weighted market over their lifetimes. * Net shareholder wealth creation totaled around $91 trillion above T-bills. Just **46 stocks** accounted for half of that total. The top \~4% of stocks (roughly 1,000 names) accounted for *all* of the net wealth creation; the remaining \~96% collectively matched T-bills or worse. Morningstar published this study in April of this year

Gestures broadly at voo/vti and scratches head at this post.

I've got my own study that disagrees. 34 losers 113 winners. 147 total 113/147 = 76.87 win rate. I'll read the study to see what their entry requirements were based upon

There is never a guarantee any stock will come back. PYPL bag holders bought the stock well above $250 and now they will wind up with around $60. Saying "it's not a loss until you sell" is just a psychological trap. The money is gone. The only question is whether the stock you are in has more potential to go higher than other stocks.

SP500 is impossible to drop more than 10%.

If you buy the biggest names, you can often of count on them to recovery after a slump. But on the other hand there are notable bankruptcies every year for "historic" companies that lost their edge, so it's not a guarantee. Or if you take a look at 99% of the stocks posted on /r/PennyStocks, you'll see plenty of companies which have no hope recovering. They reverse split and pump out new PRs to lure in new suckers, never make a profit, rinse and repeat. The other thing to think about is opportunity costs, excess return, alpha, etc... For example, someone bought MSFT for on January 2nd, you'd be up ~4%, which is technically making money. But through the lens of opportunity cost, you could have made ~13% holding the SP500, which is both more money and lower risk. Individuals are typically bad at micromanaging stocks because we get emotional and are often blind to our own biases. Meanwhile the SP500 index (all indices, I suppose) micromanage themselves formulaically - no emotion, just math making consistent adjustments over time.

Mega companies seems to be the trend, as you suggested. I barely found much mispricing in medium to small companies that is worth the risk in comparison.

There are always cycles. IIRC in 2025, mega caps carried the SP500. This year, the equal weight SP500 ETFs are out performing the mega caps, so the smaller guys are carrying more weight.

Opportunity cost is real. Also a lot of the stocks I bought during Covid never recovered, Square/Block, Snap, Target, Crisper, Sea, etc.

Target has risen a lot recently

You haven’t been in the market very long. There are some stocks that stayed flat for a decade. Disney, ATT, INTC. It’s always a good idea to get out of loser stocks. If a stock has turned bearish past the 50, I consider selling. If it’s past the 200 MA I sell. Aside from that, daily fluctuations shouldn’t cause you to sell. Follow your strategy.

An outliar are speculative stocks like apld that can move up and down the ema in unpredictable ways. I often got scared out by 20% moves which is monthly for them. 

If the stock is below what you paid, you are losing money. The idea that it is only a real loss if you sell is psychological baloney.

Not everything recovers, including ETFs that seem diversified. ARKK ETF is stil -32% over the last 5 years.

Tell that to the blokes bagholding GME 😂

You absolutely can lose if you don’t sell. The graveyard of failed companies is vast.

Depends on the company’s health. I lost every dollar on a company that went bankrupt. Set me back 15k and I could have stopped the losses many times. That mindset is why is didn’t. Yes, this is true with very strong companies but sometimes that timeframe may be 10+ years.

Every time one of my stocks drops I review/remind myself of why I bought it. If that logic holds, so do I

unless you get margin called

Depends on the stock. It could zero out. Fisker

I had some companies drop by 50-100% and kept them for years following your logic. At some point I sold and it was a relief psychologically. Cutting losses, focussing on new opportunities and a portfolio that does not constantly remind you of past mistakes.

Stock can always go down to almost zero or just delist. But of course, if it is an industry-wide recession and nothing wrong with the company itself, 90% of the time you are better off holding. It is not a smart idea to sell everything in 2008, people who lost their money are the ones who are forced to liquidate.

Pfizer hit $60 during covid, then lost 50% of it's value. It hasn't broken $30 in almost 3 years now. Before that, if you had bought it in 2000 at it's last rally, it would've taken you 20 YEARS just to break even again. Go over to the RKLB subreddit if you need more evidence about why holding forever is dangerous. There's so many people there scratching at the walls for every shred of hope they can possibly grab onto after a lot of them bought into it at $120 or higher.

Wow you're right, no individual stock has ever gone to zero. Why hasn't anyone else realized this?

I buy total market ETFs in accounts I don't pay attention to on a timely basis. I buy whatever I want (an am able to pay timely attention to) in the accounts that I pay timely attention to. You do you.

I waited with Sandisk and it bit me in the ass, hard haha

You can still lose if the stock goes poof.

I had a couple of bad bets on companies that effectively went bankrupt (Natural Gas Extraction, Tech Box Stores), and that made me nervous for quite a while. My biggest mistakes weren't holding those companies, it was selling my 100 baggers way too early...