Everyone loves it when their stocks go up. Hey, that’s the whole reason that we’re in the stock market to begin with! Unfortunately that isn’t always the case. I’m sure that in the roller coaster of a market we’ve had in past couple of months you don’t need to be reminded.

Just because a stock has gone down, doesn’t mean it’s going to go back up. Sure in the perfect world you would double up you holding and watch it jump back.

Sometimes you have to sell when it’s going down, NOT BUY!

I bring this up because I have done both. A couple months ago Sirius Satellite started to drop. I was able go get my holdings out soon at $6.00 at a loss of $1.00 per share. OUCH! But then If I would have kept them in there it hit a low of $3.60 and is now trading around $4.50. I had the potential to lose a heck of a lot more if I would have held on and tried to ‘tough it out.’

My other stock will remain unnamed as I still have the destroyed remnants of what once were (I thought) valuable shares. Let’s just say it was a bad investment from the get go. The first time I saw Cramer’s Mad Money, I got excited about a stock he was talking about and placed an order. The show was on Friday, and I was using Sharebuilder, meaning the trade wouldn’t take place until Tuesday.

I watched the stock go up during after hours on the weekend, as well as a good raise during Monday’s trading. This caused me to think, “Oh wow! Cramer really knows his stuff!”

So now I’m into an over inflated small cap stock that spends the next couple of months going up and down, but mostly down. Once the stock had been cut in half, the stock seemed to be bouncing all while staying within a $2.00 range. It’s time to double up on the downside.

Then I found out that something can be halved more than once. Instead of taking the initial loss, I’ll be taking way more than I should have.