John Neff on Selling
- from Feb 2000 Connolly Report (written just as the great bull market was peaking) Did you sell on time? There were signs.

Over the more than 30 years he ran Windsor Fund, John Neff was not a buy and holder. As you can discover by reading his excellent new book John Neff on Investing, this money manager was in and out of stocks continually. Neff was not a trader, however. On average, the fund owned stocks for about three years...about the span of one market cycle. Although, as Neff says on page 115, "So long as fundamentals remained in tact, we were not averse to holding stocks for three, four or five years."
Actually, I was reading his views on selling as BCE's price began to skyrocket. His thoughts, as far as I was concerned, seemed to fit BCE's situation beautifully:

"As always, we sold into strength." p.108
When successful investments "matured into more average yields [they] were replaced by other more standard Windsor purchases with good yields." p.73 On average, Neff's purchases provided 200 basis points more in yield.
"Catching market tops was not our game." Neff didn't seem to mind leaving some upside on the table. "We never salivated for the last dollar in a major move." p.165
"We tailored the selling the selling strategy to Windsor's average appreciation potential." p.116g strategy to Windsor's average appreciation potential." p.116

Valuing Wall Street by Smithers and Wright has a lot of excellent material on selling (from pages 169 to 174 and on pages 187 and 188), including most of Chapter 18 - What to Do with Your Money after you sell: alternatives to stocks. If you do not already own this excellent book, it's worth buying Valuing Wall Street just for the ideas on selling: it could save you a bundle.
Here are some ideas from the book. Remember that Valuing Wall Street was written in late 1999 just before 'the bubble' was to burst. Smithers and Wright were correct...just a few months early.
When the market (q ratio) is high, "by far the most important thing you can do with your money is get it out of stocks".p169 Smithers and Wright then talk about the psychological and practical problems of selling. For instance, they discuss "the impossibility of knowing exactly the right time to sell. The decision to sell must be based on fundamental value considerations and will always appear risky in the short term. As we saw if the last chapter, if investors are selling into a rising market, they are likely to find that they would have done better by waiting.. On the other hand, if they try to sell once the stock market has turned, they will be constantly reminding themselves that they could have done better if only they had not waited." p.170