Wall Street has gone out of it’s way to make it easy to buy stocks but at the same time convince you that the market is way too sophisticated for the average investor. They promote the professionals while promoting a buy and hold strategy.

I think the main reason that they recommend buying and holding your stocks is because they don’t know when to sell. Since they don’t know when to sell, they promote never selling. What an easy out. The time to buy is always right now and the time to sell is long term.

If you really want to make money buying stocks you can’t adopt that philosophy. You’ve got to study the stocks to buy and look for two distinct prices — the price you are going to buy at and the price you are going to sell at. Doing that is easier than you think but it’s an art not a science. What that means is that the skill doesn’t come without practice.

To do this, you need one important tool and that’s a stock chart that shows the price and volume action for the stock over period of time. What you are looking for is identifying when the stock is being bought by institutional investors which are the driving force behind pushing a stocks price higher. You do that by noticing when a stocks price is closing higher on higher than average volume. How can you tell when to sell, by looking at the exact opposite. When a stock price closes lower on higher volume, that’s your cue to exit the stock. By observing these clues to who is buying the stock, with practice you can pick when to buy and sell stocks like a professional.