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I carelessly invested in a stock on a spike near the peak price. How can I salvage my investment?
If you're asking this question, you probably aren't ready to be buying individual stock shares, and may not be ready to be investing in the market at all.  Short-term in the stock market is GAMBLING, pure and simple, and gambling against professionals at that. You can reduce your risk if you spend the amount of time and effort the pros do on it, but if you aren't ready to accept losses you shouldn't be playing and if you aren't willing to bet it all on a single throw of the dice you should diversify and accept lower potential gain in exchange for lower risk. (Standard advice: Index funds.)  The way an investor, as opposed to a gambler, deals with a stock price dropping -- or surging upward, or not doing anything! -- is to say "That's interesting. Given where it is NOW, do I expect it to go up or down from here, and do I think I have someplace to put the money that will do better?" If you believe the stock will gain value from here, holding it may make more sense than taking your losses.  Specific example: the mortgage-crisis market crash of a few years ago. People who sold because stock prices were dropping and they were scared -- or whose finances forced them to sell during the down period -- were hurt badly. Those of us who were invested for the long term and could afford to leave the money in the market -- or who were brave/contrarian enough to see it as an opportunity to buy at a better price -- came out relatively unscathed; all I have "lost" was two years of growth. So: You made your bet. Now you have to decide: Do you really want to "buy high, sell low" and take the loss as a learning experience, or do you want to wait and see whether you can sell not-so-low. If you don't know enough about the company to make a fairly rational decision on that front, you probably shouldn't have bought its stock.