Best Of

^ agreed 100%. I never try to catch the bottoms or the tops, only a chunk of the middle. If you look at price action and The Strat we focus on reversals but we need to wait until we get a break above a previoss candle so we miss out on the whole lower 1/2 of that candle and that's fine. When I sell I have my target set before I even get into the trade. If it goes higher then that's fine. It hit my target and I'm happy with that. There are other strategies that can get higher targets but I'm more on the conservative side. If you try to catch tops and bottoms you will lose in the long run.

@Dream_Inn has, in my opinion, expressed a key point in investing. If you have made a good profit don't worry about missing out at the absolute top. Squeezing the last nickel out of a stock AKA "pigs get fed hogs get slaughtered" is a fool's game. At that point you are chasing diminishing returns against escalating risks. A long time investing advisor of mine has always advised "you can't time the market"  I only agree somewhat with that. Yes, the big funds can buy and sell so fast that the "ordinary" investor can not only be frozen-out of the action but actually harmed financially. That said, opportunities to time the market present themselves a lot and it depends on your willingness to participate. In the not too distant past the DJIA dropped 5K points. IMO this was a no-brainer investment moment. I informed our advisor that we were going to invest considerable money into a number of stocks. The advisor was concerned and cautioned "you could invest all this money and the market could still drop further" We replied (using an elevator as an analogy) if we get on the (investment) elevator on the third floor and it drops to the first floor we won't worry because if we have done our homework and read the situation correctly the elevator is heading to the twelfth floor and that will be fine with us. Again using @Dream_Inn's analogy for selling before an absolute "top" it isn't also necessary to buy at an absolute "bottom" to make a lot of money. There are about 4 trillion dollars sitting in cash on the sidelines. It has to go somewhere. I remember an "expert" saying the DJIA will never, ever hit 35,000. I'm now reading opinion pieces that it is just a matter on time until the DJIA hits 40,000. IMO - no question about that.