I think I see the problem. How many years can you live off a 25% year of winning trades? If your answer is less than 2 you either need to do real well ALL of the time, or you need other sources of income. In other words, you need to build up more capital. You don't want to be eating your seed corn, because you won't have any to plant if you do. For example, I sold my M Roadster. No, not to pay bills, but to buy more shares with the money. To be honest, if you are needing to sell just to pay regular bills, you need to ask yourself what the heck you are going to do if the market does a nosedive... I bet if you asked the "value investors" around here you'd find we usually have enough cash and liquid investments that we can live for YEARS without needing to sell. Because of that, if I need to, I can wait as long as I feel like till my stocks are reasonably valued.