Big week for Alphabet. I bought them a year ago this week when mild earnings caused them to pull back. Currently sitting on 5 shares, not life-changing, but the jump from earnings yesterday made me about $150.
Now that it's long-term capital gains, I'm considering selling.
Ey! Are you me? I bought 5 shares of then-google couple years go for ~$550 per share! Now at $962 I'm up about $2k, or 80%. It's sitting at a PE of 30, and I'm wondering how much higher it can go?? Thinking of collecting my profits and move on, probably to an index. Advice?
I don't really do play money anymore, and it's a tiny part of my NW, but still money. Loosing out would suck.
Neither of you should be picking individual stocks. By itself the stock price and how much it has gone up mean nothing.
Is Alphabet still growing, are they continuing to generate more profits? Are they a great business with a history of innovation? Do you see where they are headed in the future?
It's often the case that businesses doing well are the ones that keep on doing well. In many cases the signal of a stock price going up and up is a signal that it's going to go up more.
But most importantly, in order to make money in the stock market you need to find great companies (or buy an index fund) and hold on to it for a very long time, in spite of up and down fluctuations.
You were lucky enough to pick a single good investment. Now you want to sell. What is the chance that you will find another company going forward that is better than GOOGL?
Until you can answer those types of questions instead of being scared off by a little price fluctuation either way you are much better off indexing. But you have to be willing to suffer the fluctuations both UP and DOWN even in an index portfolio.
Otherwise I predict you will underperform over the long term