Exactly when to sell your stock for PROFIT 📈💰🚀

Everyone loves to talk about when to buy a stock, but almost nobody tells you when to sell, and that's where most investors make their biggest mistakes. Today, I'm gonna break down exactly when to sell a stock for profit, step-by-step with clear rules that you can actually use. My name's Nolan Govea, my students call me Professor G, and I made this channel to make investing simplified. Here's the challenge. If you sell too early, you cut yourself off from the real growth. If you sell too late, you watch your gains disappear. Think about it. How many times have you sold a stock only to watch it double after you sold? Or the opposite, you held too long and your profits evaporated. So the question is, how do we find that sweet spot? I'm gonna give you three practical rules that cover pretty much all situations. Rule number one would be sell when your original reason for buying is no longer true. If you bought a stock because of strong earnings growth and that growth disappears, it's time to reevaluate. The stock might still go up, but it no longer fits your strategy. I tell my clients all the time to take a good, hard assessment of their stocks. Ask yourself, is this stock actually going to beat the S&P 500 over the next five years? Or something you could ask yourself is, do you think this stock is gonna double within the next five years? If not, why are you holding onto it? We know that statistically, over the last hundred years, the S&P 500 has gone up about 10% each and every year on average, so if you're not gonna get at least that through this stock and holding it actually brings more risk to your portfolio, there's really no reason why we can't just rip the bandaid off, cut it, and get back to actual solid long-term investing with great ETFs. Rule number two would be use price targets and trailing stops. Before you even buy, set a target. If this stock goes up 30%, I'll take some profit. But don't guess. Use fundamentals like earnings growth or valuation multiples. And to protect gains, many investors use a trailing stop. For example, selling if the stock drops 20% from its peak. That way, you let your winners run, but lock in profits if momentum reverses. Rule number three, rebalance when your portfolio gets unbalanced. This is a very tough one. I meet with a lot of clients, and I'm seeing, especially these days, heavy, heavy, heavy amounts in Palantir or Nvidia or Tesla, possibly because you bought it five years ago and it's gone up like crazy. But if that's 80% of your portfolio in one or two stocks, that's a very risky place to be. Let's say you bought Apple, or nowadays it's probably more like Nvidia or Palantir, and it grows so much that it becomes 40% of your portfolio. Even if you love Apple or Nvidia, that's too much risk in one basket. Selling a portion to rebalance reduces risk while still letting you ride the upside. When you look at your portfolio and you see that huge gain, it went up 500%, 1,000%, a lot of people just like to use that as a trophy, and they just keep it there because it is cool to look at, and it's awesome that you made that much money. But you really haven't actually made any money until you actually sell, until you lock in that profit. So I would start looking at those and actually start making that assessment to possibly sell. But I understand that selling is hard, so let's talk about it. Knowing when to sell is actually less about the numbers and more about psychology. Think about it. Wall Street runs on two emotions, fear and greed, and those emotions can trick even the smartest investors into making the wrong decision. Fear makes us sell too early. You buy a stock at $50, it jumps to $60, and suddenly you think, what if it drops back down? I better lock in gains. But by selling too soon, you miss the real growth. This is why so many people kick themselves when they sell, only to watch that stock actually grow by double after they've sold. But then greed makes us hold for too long. On the flip side, you're up 80%, but you think, why sell now? It could go higher. Suddenly, the stock drops 40% and you're right back to where you started, or worse. This tug of war between fear and greed is what makes us have the most mistakes. So how do we fight back? Super important, but equally as important, is the sponsor of today's video, Outskill. This weekend, you can join the two-day AI Mastermind Workshop by Outskill, the world's first AI-focused education platform. Now, this training normally costs $895, but I've partnered with Outskill to give away 1,000 free seats exclusively for my viewers, just for the next 72 hours. By the way, it's rated 4.9 out of five on Trustpilot, and it's highly credible. Now, what makes this different? 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So like I was saying, this tug-of-war between fear and greed is what causes the biggest mistakes. So how do we do this correctly? We use discipline and systems. Best investors in the world, people like Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch, don't let emotions dictate their decisions. They rely on preset rules. Here's a couple of psychological tricks you can use. Number one, write down your exit plan before you buy. For example, if the company's earnings growth slows, I'll sell. If it rises 40%, I'll take half my profit. Having a rule in writing takes the emotion out of the moment. Number two, reframe profits. A lot of people say, I don't wanna sell because I might miss more upside. But think of it this way. Every profit you lock in is future optionality. It's cash you can redeploy into your next opportunity. Number three, avoid anchoring bias. Investors often say, I can't sell until it gets back to the price I wanted. That's not rational. The market doesn't care about your personal buy price. What matters is, would you buy this stock today at today's price? If the answer is no, maybe it's time to sell. The bottom line is, if you don't control your emotions, the market is going to control it for you. And that usually ends in regret. Here's a quick example. Suppose you buy Nvidia at $100. You set a profit target of $150 and a trailing stop at 20%. The stock runs up to $180. Amazing, you're now protecting profits with your stop loss. It pulls back to $144. That's still a 44% gain. And your rule automatically told you when to sell. No guesswork, no regret, just discipline. Now to be honest, I don't really set stop losses at all. That's because my investing style and needs don't need them. But maybe yours do. If you answer yes to either of these questions, maybe you should employ the stop loss. Number one, do you not understand the stock that you're investing in fully? Number two, do you need to make sure that you don't lose too much money in the short term? Because you may actually need this money that you're investing with soon. Number three, are you retired and have too much of your money in equities? So you just can't afford any big swings at any one point. If you answered yes to any one of those questions, you're probably understandably much more anxious when it comes to investing and when it comes to actually possibly losing money in the short term. You may need the stop loss to minimize the amount of loss that you're gonna see at any one point. For those of you that can let the investment sit and push through this momentary drop, it may actually be better for you. From the example from before, NVIDIA was bought at $100, then it went up to $180, then dropped to $144. Let's just say it dropped again to $120, but all this was because of some bad news out of a different country, and then a week or two later, all that news was negated, and the company actually shot right back up, and over $200 now. Well, if you have the stop loss on, you're automatically sold out of the stock. So you may actually lose out on the long-term gains this way. The stop loss keeps you from going too far down, but it also kicks you out of a certain stock maybe before you're ready to be out of it. Maybe you could have held if it was up to you. This actually happened in April of 2025 this year. Many people that I know had to sell out of a lot of their stock when it dipped super hard, but then within a couple months, it not only recovered, but soared to all-time new highs in almost everything. So a lot of people missed out on a lot of gains. You need to understand why you're investing, what your investment horizon is, what exactly it is that you're investing into, and all of that will set you up for success. To sum it up, you should sell a stock for profit when your original reason for buying is gone, your price target or trailing stop is hit, your portfolio is out of balance. But also, selling may not be your best option, and you'll only know that if you understand all the things that I was talking about from before and basically understand what is your why in this investing. This is my goal on this channel, to help you figure that out for yourself so that you can be very successful. Selling doesn't have to be emotional, it should be systematic. Now, to continue your financial education and keep going strong towards becoming the best investor possible, watch either of these videos and remember to keep investing simplified.