Does a disciplined stock investor stick with their original sell strategy, or stay in and make more?
Ask yourself a better question: Under my current investment criteria would I buy the stock at this price? If the answer to that question is yes you need to work out at what price you would now sell out of the position. Think of these as totally separate decisions from your original decisions to buy and at what price to sell. If you would buy the stock now if you didn't already hold a position then you should keep that position as if you had sold out at the price that you had originally seen as your take profit level and bought a new position at the current price without incurring the costs. If you would not buy now by those criteria then you should sell out as planned. This is essentially netting off two investing decisions. Something to think about is that the world has changed and if you knew what you know now then you would probably have set your price limit higher. To be disciplined as an investor also means reviewing current positions frequently and without any sympathy for past decisions. One of things I've learned about trading on the stock market is not to let your emotions get to you. Greed and fear are among them. You may be overthinking. Why not keep it simple, if you think it can go up to $300 a share, put in a stop loss at $X amount where you would secure your invested money along with some gains. If it goes up, let it go up, if it doesn't well you got an exit.  Then if it goes up change your stop loss amount higher if you are feeling more optimistic about the stock.  And by the way, a disciplined investor would stick to their strategy but also have the smarts to rethink it on the fly such as in a situation like you are in. Just in my opinion anyway, but congrats on the gain! Some gains are better than none.
"A 'Call' gives you the right, but not the obligation, to buy a stock at a particular price. The price, called the ""strike price"" is fixed when you buy the option. Let's run through an example - AAPL trades @ $259. You think it's going up over the next year, and you decide to buy the $280 Jan11 call for $12.  Here are the details of this trade. Your cost is $1200 as options are traded on 100 shares each. You start to have the potential to make money only as Apple rises above $280 and the option trades ""in the money."" It would take a move to $292 for you to break even, but after that, you are making $100 for each dollar it goes higher. At $300, your $1200 would be worth $2000, for example. A 16% move on the stock and a 67% increase on your money. On the other hand, if the stock doesn't rise enough by January 2011, you lose it all.  A couple points here - American options are traded at any time. If the stock goes up next week, your $1200 may be worth $1500 and you can sell. If the option is not ""in the money"" its value is pure time value. There have been claims made that most options expire worthless. This of course is nonsense, you can see there will always be options with a strike below the price of the stock at expiration and those options are ""in the money."" Of course, we don't know what those options were traded at.  On the other end of this trade is the option seller. If he owns Apple, the sale is called a ""covered call"" and he is basically saying he's ok if the stock goes up enough that the buyer will get his shares for that price. For him, he knows that he'll get $292 (the $280, plus the option sale of $12) for a stock that is only $259 today. If the stock stays under $280, he just pocketed $12, 4.6% of the stock value, in just 3 months. This is why call writing can be a decent strategy for some investors. Especially if the market goes down, you can think of it as the investor lowering his cost by that $12. This particular strategy works best in a flat to down market. Of course in a fast rising market, the seller misses out on potentially high gains.  (I'll call it quits here, just to say a Put is the mirror image, you have the right to sell a stock at a given price. It's the difference similar to shorting a stock as opposed to buying it.) If you have a follow up question - happy to help. EDIT - Apple closed on Jan 21, 2011 at $326.72, the $280 call would have been worth $46.72 vs the purchase price of $12. Nearly 4X return (A 289% gain) in just over 4 months for a stock move of 26%. This is the leverage you can have with options. Any stock could just as easily trade flat to down, and the entire option premium, lost." "Isn't it true that on the ex-dividend date, the price of the stock goes down roughly the amount of the dividend? That is, what you gain in dividend, you lose in price drop. Yes and No. It Depends! Generally stocks move up and down during the market, and become more volatile on some news. So One can't truly measure if the stock has gone down by the extent of dividend as one cannot isolate other factors for what is a normal share movement. There are time when the prices infact moves up. Now would it have moved more if there was no dividend is speculative. Secondly the dividends are very small percentage compared to the shares trading price. Generally even if 100% dividend are announced, they are on the share capital. On share prices dividends would be less than 1%. Hence it becomes more difficult to measure the movement of stock. Note if the dividend is greater than a said percentage, there are rules that give guidelines to factor this in options and other area etc. Lets not mix these exceptions. Why is everyone making a big deal out of the amount that companies pay in dividends then? Why do some people call themselves ""dividend investors""? It doesn't seem to make much sense. There are some set of investors who are passive. i.e. they want to invest in good stock, but don't want to sell it; i.e. more like keep it for long time. At the same time they want some cash potentially to spend; similar to interest received on Bank Deposits. This class of share holders, it makes sense to invest into companies that give dividends, as year on year they keep receiving some money. If they on the other hand has invested into a company that does not give dividends, they would have to sell some units to get the same money back. This is the catch. They have to sell in whole units, there is brokerage, fees, etc, there are tax events. Some countries have taxes that are more friendly to dividends than capital gains. Thus its an individual choice whether to invest into companies that give good dividends or into companies that don't give dividends.  Giving or not giving dividends does not make a company good or bad." Kodari Securities (KOSEC) has a unique approach towards investing. Kodari Securities understands that investing in the stock market requires a clear strategy. As an investor you need to compare different shares and understand how to buy and sell in the market. The stock market has no magic formulae’s to buying shares. An investor has to have the ability to equip themselves with knowledge. Kodari Securities is aware that the more knowledge an investor has, the higher their success rate. If the company is stable. I like to recoup losses by buying in the valley and selling it all at the plateau and then learning as all beginners do, don't  buy stocks because there's a feeding frenzy...or because Joe told me too. Pick your strategy in stocks and learn to stick with that. If you have no strategy, buy land. Say I am an employee of Facebook and I will be able to sell stares at enough of a profit to pay of my mortgage and have enough money left to cover my living costs for many years. I also believe that there is a 95% chance that the stock price will go up in the next few years. Do I take a 5% risk, when I can transform my life without taking any risk?   (The USA tax system as explained by JoeTaxpayer increases the risk.)  So you have a person being very logical and selling stocks that they believe will go up in value by more than any other investment they could have.   It is called risk control. (Lot of people will know the above; therefore some people will delay buying stock until Lock Up expiration day hoping the price will be lower on that day.   So the price may not go down.) How so? If i sell short, then i make a profit only if the price goes down so i can buy back at a lower price. Yes, but if the price is going up then you would go long instead. Shorting a stock (or any other asset) allows you to profit when the price is going down. Going long allows you to profit when the price is going up. In the opposite cases, you lose money. In order to make a profit in either of those situations, you have to accurately assess which way the price will trade over the period of time you are dealing with. If you make the wrong judgment, then you lose money because you'll either sell for a lower price than you bought (if you went long), or have to buy back at a higher price than you sold for (if you went short). In either case, unless the trader can live with making a short-term loss and recouperating it later, one needs a good stop-loss strategy. "... what does any broker encourage? The ability to buy or sell at the market. How do they encourage that? By allowing people to do it at a lower cost. So, whatever others ""encourage"" people to do, Robinhood does the same, just for less money.   Do people always do what's best or most successful? No, some people like taking in lots of risk for the opportunity for a greater reward, do they understand what they're doing? If they don't, they will as soon as they start losing all their money.   Robinhood is no different than other brokers, just allows for cheaper opportunity." No. That's the point of a passive strategy: you maintain a more or less constant mix of assets and don't try to figure out what's going to move where.