Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

When do I sell a stock that I hold as a long-term position?
For what it's worth -- and I realize this isn't directly an answer to the question -- one of the advantages of sticking with mutual funds, beyond their being inherently diversified, is that it removes a lot of the temptation to try to time the market. When you need money, you sell shares in such a way that it maintains your preferred investment ratio, and simply don't worry about which stocks are  actually involved. (I've gotten 15% APR this year across all my investments, for absolutely minimal effort. That's quite good enough for me.)