Selecting stocks is hard, but what is even harder is selling them.

If you have a profit people have a tendency to sell them too soon and leave further profits on the table because they want to be right.

If you have a loss people have a tendency to hold on to them too long because they don't want to be wrong.

If people remember that it isn't about being right and making correct market calls and that it is about making money then good risk management techniques are much easier to implement.

Hold onto your winners and get rid of your losers.

You are so right...I too am very good selecting good ASX stocks. For selling my stocks I use trailing stop loss rules when the stock drops below my threshold price I sell. But I set my trailing stop loss thresholds daily. Looking for affordable software to do this for me. ....any ideas where I should start?

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Thé hardest part is not selecting but constructing and selling at the right time

To create a program to sell for you, your rules have to be very strict. The actions and timing of what you do on a daily basis needs to recorded and then translated into rules that a computer can understand.

ie. everyday at 12 pm sharp you check the value of all of your stock holdings, then ...... I would suggest that you go over every action that you have taken or not taken for the last year and record this in a daily journal, especially the actionable events and the reasons why you took the actions. This would include buys, sells, stop losses, and changes in stop losses. Then can you also tie your reasoning to each event?

I guess it depends on what this "list of events" looks like and whether the events can be understood by the computer. Stock XYZ fell by

X%, can probably be understood by a computer and that % creates a buy or sell event or a change in a stop loss. Some things can be checked by a computer, like what the current price of stock XYZ is. How that price affects your desired actions is not as easy to "program" and can you tell your journal why in such a way that the computer understands. The computer can only understand "rules" and nothing else. It can watch and react to changes, but only to changes in "quantifiable facts". Thanks, David

When you get all of this information ie, current prices, this would then need be put into the computer and if the rules exist, it could make decisions to buy or sell or change a stop loss, etc. This might be pretty difficult to program, it might need to change according to the user and it might even change with the circumstances for each user. There are some brokers that have some fairly flexible "trade stations", but I can not give you any names.

You mentioned trailing stop losses and there are many brokerages that can create this as a percent i believe, but I have never done this and I guess this would need be updated at least periodically.

One very well know and very successful hedge fund manager I used to work with used to say that any trading system (for example...breakouts, moving average crossovers, Elliot wave etc...) would work if strict risk management discipline was followed.

Interactive Brokers have come a long way over the years on the TWS platform and accommodate both retail and institutional clients. They have an excellent scaled exist (or entry) algorithm which can disguise large sales in an illiquid equity (as well as liquid). You can also use their API function for complex exit algorithms and hire a coder to build your quantitative triggers. You can do direct or SMART routed orders and they allow access to ASX. Hope this helps.