There is really no way to rationalize letting a trade turn into an investment. It is always a bad idea. That's why God created stops. One of his better ideas. In your present circumstances, you are looking at a terrible chart that calls for selling, not buying. I would take your licks and move on.
Edit: Deleted my post about writing ATM Dec calls. Personally it would drive me crazy looking at that loser trade all year. Good luck and good trading to all.
%% They're selling it on most time frames ,Zhorn/long horn. And again its below 200day moving average. 52 week range, oops, its in bottom half. SPY has done about 12% YTD; but they're only weighted 5% in energy. Me;I want a good dividend for stock investments; but its a sell on 200day moving average ,50dma. Pays a good dividend+ up 12.55% YTD+ better stock than TSLA. If i missed the 2oodma/50 dma sell/ pull the trigger@55 area.It could turn or go DOWN to $6.66 as GE did .........Thats a fun sector, black gold ,TX TEA; but it cycles, like XOM Tillerson noted..............................................................................
You can't fix this aside from getting out or just HODLing but the only thing you can do is fix the next time. As others have mentioned there are ways to protect your investment and/or reduce your cost basis: 1. Stop loss 2. Buy protective puts 3. Sell covered calls
You did have a plan when you entered, that was to buy and hold. Now that it has dropped you're having 'Buyers remorse'. Stick with your original plan. You may not remember, but you had to have thought price could drop. If you get out now, you'll be devastated when it climbs back up. This is not a trade, it was an investment of your choosing.
Checked the company fundamentals. Looks like after 2016 low revenue, it is growing again. Cash flow is a concern but it recently filed to raise $500M, 10yr note. If successful, it will solve near term cash. So I think the Dec low could be bottom. Quoting @murray t turtle: Not a prediction, just a speculation from an amateur mom and pop retail.
Unfortunately, no matter how great the company is, oil isn’t in a great spot and oil and gas stocks are highly correlated to their the commodity prices. Some of the large integrated companies are less correlated but their also large non volatile blue chips for the most part. If you bought it as an investment, perhaps it has a decent dividend, then perhaps it’s not the worst idea to hold if you think they can weather low oil prices. If you bought it as a shorter term trade then the best bet is to exit. Entering trades is easy, exiting is hard so you need to plan out when your going to exit before you even enter the trade. Time to hold, target price, trailing stop maybe, hard stop, scale in/ out points. Much easier if you have a plan before hand then trying to do it on the fly with emotions behind the decisions.
The problem with that is you could end holding for a long time trying to breakeven. This is my story when I started getting into the stockmarket. Remember the dot com boom. I made $25,000 on EMLX and TLGD then, hell, I felt rich. Went to Las Vegas multiple times, treated my friends to lunch at a Japanese buffet, I took about 60 friends in all. It cost about $18 a piece then, not counting the drinks and tips. Bought CSCO then, at around $120 if I recall correctly. I had 200 shares of it. That was around year 2000? Now, 03/15/19, CSCO closed at $53.20. So, about 19 years later, assuming I still had those shares today, I would still be sitting at 55.66% loss and still waiting to breakeven. If you have 50 years to wait, maybe, you will get lucky to breakeven. Take note, you can also, lose more monies while, waiting and be deeper in the hole. Now, I am a trader and use risk management on all my trades including, stop losses, exit rules. Warren Buffett, started early when he was very young, bought his stocks near the bottom. Very few people can actually, do what he did.
This is flawed reasoning. Just because something has been at a price before, does not mean it will again. This is a psychological heuristic called anchoring. I had a friends and his wife come & chat with me once at a party, they had a disagreement about an 'amazing investment' he wanted to get into. There was an oil ETF that had gone from $32 down to $1.20 and her husband wanted to load up on it because he was focused on the possibility of a return $32. My initial response to them both, on hearing the story was "if it went from $32 to $1.20 - it's sh*t". Not exactly trading genius. On investigation, I did indeed find it was as I suspected.Fortunately they stayed away. Looking at your stock - sales & profits are increasing, debt is going down, cash position is OK. Looks solid - but none of that means it's under or over valued. It just means it's viable. Perhaps it's just that oil prices are at a low and this is knocking on to your share price. With this in mind - how do you personally decide what factors you will base your decision on? Or what your target price is? I mean - how do you decide that it's not likely to go to $50? If previous price is the only factor in your decision making, you are guaranteed to be always buying things that are on their way down, right?