The main difficulty I find is to decide when to sell, stay put for a while and then buy back in. For the last couple of weeks my investor advisor has recommended to sell some of the gold stocks and buy something else, sector change or rotation.

I personally do not buy this at the present point, but clearly this philosphy has significant support among big investment companies, it also means it could become fullfilling by the fact that such advice goes out to lots of investors.

"hold" forever sort of never works either since every company has a life cycle, so the key would be to find out when a sector will start to fade or when a sector will start to rise.

Once I heared a real estate sales man say that you should buy when things look the darkest but you have to make sure the reason for this dark side is only temporarly and not permanent. Housing, oil, oil sands they are down, is it temporarly, will they drop further and how long before start to increase?

Gold has gone up a lot and in particular the major producers, the question is if this will continue, my advisor thinks not. We know there will be a lot of 'money (borrowed from the future)' flowing into the economy but what are the effects, short term bump or not.

I don't know the answers but the reality is that if we limit losses to some minimum, we do not need many big winners to still do very well. Look at major league base ball players, they hit less than 33% of the time and still make millions!