[Halfcan]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

I'm going to explain, and you'll likely laugh at me.

In 1991 and 1992, I bought Dell stock twice when it was a very young company. I was living in Austin at the time, and it wasn't a lot of money, but I was a poor grad student. Both times, I doubled my money, sold out, and thought I was a genius. However, if I hadn't sold, that $4,000 in stock would've been worth $250,000 by the end of the 90s. I was standing in the middle of a gold mine, and I walked out. It. Kills. Me.

So now I have a strategy, and I stick to it religiously. I buy stock in lumps of $4,000 or $5,000. When I get to the point where I've made 20%, I sell out my original share and leave the profit in. That way, if the stock goes down I haven't lost any of my principal, and if the stock goes all Dell I'll still get the upside, albeit in a smaller dose. But I won't completely miss the boat.

I've been using this system for about 6 or 7 years now. The result is that I'm slowly building my own mutual fund of dividend-paying stocks with growth potential that I've hand-picked. It disseminates my risk but also gives me enough concentration that I have the potential to beat the market significantly.

Great advice!