I make a habit of using the Preserve feature in MarketMatrix in order to check what my closed positions did after I closed them. This is a handy retrospective, since I can see which big losses I avoid (and which big profits I managed to duck).
The stand-out among these is Avis (symbol CAR), which I got stopped out of on March 3 at 33 cents. It is at $6.56 now, a 1720% gain in the span of four months. A $4,290 position is now worth $85,280. Ugh.
Here's what the percentage chart looks like from that stop-out point:
Here's the longer-term price chart. You can see how we are just beneath a Fibonacci level here.
What do I take away from this? First, don't sell stocks that are about to go up 1800% (ahem). In all seriousness, it shows the power of percent. The battered stocks from March are the only bright spot in my trading over the past four months. This is why, over the very long haul, the bulls always come out on top, because growth is, by and large, the nature of the human experience, and you cannot beat the power of percentage gains like this.
