Spring clean of the ol' portfolio

[NZSilver]

Cleaned out some stocks on the portfolio to cement some paper losses - never good, but as the saying goes - treat your stocks like staff - get rid of the bad ones and keep the good ones.

Its very easy to do the opposite and hold crap stocks while selling ones with gains - and often these go to gain more and the crap ones loose more, and hang in your portfolio for years.

Also that capital in the crap ones - its good to get it working again - the longer you hold them the more opportunity cost.

I decided to have a cull out while the market is trading high, get some cash and possibly re-invest (interest rates look like they wont move much now so bank returns will be average)

Most of the stocks were more specys and only a very small portion of my portfolio - but im learning the hard way and I will stop speculating, as warren says number 1 is not to loose money.

Its an easy mistake to buy a specy and then do well out of it and think your on to something - really it was most likely a fluke and then you try some more specys and you loose twice as much as you made on the fluke. Better to buy specys once they are profitable - loose some of the early gains but get the rest of them if they make it.

Feels good to tidy things up, and wth every mistake there is a good education on what not to do.

sold
GTK - burnt post ipo - down approx 15%
HDX - downtrend, mining, poor margins, revenue guidance missed, down approx 45%
SKO - got caught up in the hype down approx 15%
TPT - high risk high reward - new it/accepted it - doubled my $1000 investment before it turned into $60 down approx 100%
TSI - up to f all, only small investment - sick of it down approx 35%

would like to know others thoughts on when and how they tidy things up in their portfolio!

also everyone talks up their good picks but why not talk about the horrible ones - since everyone makes mistakes.