LOL..CGB

I don't need someone to shovel or mow the grass..I'm married !!! LOL ...I do it myself !!!

I agree with your statement that most investors buy into a stock without a plan. This is truely a recipe for disaster. Without a plan you bring luck, into the investing equation, and sooner or later a person's luck runs out. In the stock market the odds are against you to start, to further tip the odds against yourself without a plan is not a good idea even for the most seasoned investor.

I can tell you how I enter a trade, but this is me, so take it with a grain of salt, it is my plan and may not work for you. Before buying a stock, I would hope you have done some good DD on it before buying.

So lets say you have $20,000 you want to invest into a stock like NOT. Lets say for easy number figuring it is trading at $5 when you buy, so you buy 4,000 shares of NOT at $5. Before entering into this trade you should know how much money you are willing to lose if something goes wrong with your stock selection. Knowing how much you are willing to lose is Rule #1, money management is the key to staying in the stock market game. I would hope no one would be willing to lose more than 10% on this stock buy, in fact i would suggest no more than 5%. However going with 10% would mean you are willing to lose $2,000 before you throw your hands in the air and say enough. What you are saying here is if NOT went to $4.50 you would sell your stock and take your $2,000 loss. At this point a person would say I was wrong, I need to go back to the drawing board and figure out where I went wrong.

Now that we know how much we are willing to lose, we can look at the part most of us are concerned with. How much do we want to make? Lets say we wanted to make 10% on our buy, this would mean we would be willing to sell NOT at $5.50 and make a $2,000 profit. However this is where we can stack the odds in our favour. The stock is going up, we don't have to sell, in fact if it is in an uptrend, I would suggest you keep riding your winner. You can let the stock go up and put a stop loss under it at $5.50 once it is over this price. You can keep raising your stop loss as the stock goes up maximizing your profits. The safer way is sell 2,000 of your shares at $5.50 and let the stock run. Your cost of the last 2,000 shares is now only $4.50. Now you have some room to play with, and the decision of what to do with the last 2,000 becomes much easier. Your cost is low enough you have built yourself a safety net from down moves in the share price.

It is at this point I start buying and selling the original 2,000 shares I sold. My goal here would be to bring the cost of the other 2,000 shares I hold, to zero cost. Then i simply don't care, I can become a long term investor of the stock and enjoy absolutely no risk to my start up capital.

Plan your trade and trade your plan. JMHO

Al