Anyone else keep accidentally checking the market and then remembering its a bank holiday? It's so much easier when I don't have to work on the holiday, but my company doesn't give us every federal holiday off.
I seem to go through phases. When the market was consistently down, I could go weeks without checking. Now there are consistent highs, I find myself checking several times a day.
I usually check the market at work, so major federal holidays are easy to avoid checking for me. The hard ones are the less common holidays when I'm still working.
I've finally got my first stock with my employers through their discount purchase plan. Does anyone have anecdotes or interesting math on when to sell?
It depends on the rules of the plan. Some plans require you hold for a certain amount of time, while others may let you sell immediately.
When I had employee stock, my philosophy was to sell ASAP and treat the discount as a cash bonus. Since I did not have an allocation for single company stocks in my investment plan, it made the most sense to sell and reinvest that money into VTSAX.
I usually sell everything as soon as I can. It was best when I was able to sell immediately; a 15% return on ~1.5 months investment time? I'll take as much as I can and happily pay the tax on it.
Sadly, they now have us locked in to a 1 year minimum holding period, which sucks. I had still been selling everything as soon as I could, but the return is no longer guaranteed because the price can drop in that time.
Our stock dropped a while back to what I consider below market value and so I have been holding while the price has slowly come back up. The good news is that everything I've bought since then has been really cheap, but I'm now holding far more of my company's stock than I would like as a share of my portfolio.
I think we've just recently gotten back to fair value, so I'm starting to think about selling. I've also been selling covered calls along the way, so I have at least gotten a little extra income while holding.
One item I think interesting, is that the effective period for the initial gain is one-half of the offer period. A 15% gain with a 6 month offer period becomes a 60% APR.