Want a hot stock tip? Ask me which stock I’m thinking about buying… then buy anything else but that. No, I’m not joking: I now have a 5-year track record of picking hot stocks the instant they lose their momentum.

Men’s Warehouse? I bought stock last March 5 at $42.60. By the end of the day it closed down at $42.23. But I wasn’t going to panic. Oh, no, not me. I have, after all, taken a well-respected stock trading course, although not being a “numbers person” my mind kept wandering. I regularly browse the columns over at Motley Fool and even have a print subscription to The Wall Street Journal… although I tend to use it to line my cat box more often than I actually read it.

But I’ve picked up enough to know that I take a little off the table simply because the market is getting shaky or an otherwise well-performing stock is starting to slide. So I held on to those shares and waited… and waited…and waited for the up-trend. I’m still waiting — for the entire year since I purchased the company’s stock it’s crept steadily downward, closing at $23.09 on Friday.

For a while there, I stood to actually make money with my Microsoft shares. That is, if I’d been paying attention to my portfolio any time prior to the news about Microsoft’s failed bid for Yahoo! Which I wasn’t because, no matter how hard I try, financial news bores the heck out of me.

See, that’s the downside of being the kind of person who mentally shuts down whenever there are too many numbers in front of me. Knowing that the ultimate goal of any good stock trading system is to “buy low, sell high”, I’ll see a headline about how the Dow and NASQAQ fell but the S&P edged up and figure I’d better check it out.

Then I’ll read something like this:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off nearly 100 points earlier before paring those losses to end down 28.77 points, or 0.23%, at 12,348.21. The Nasdaq Composite gave back 10.74 points, or 0.46%, to 2321.80. The S&P 500 spent much of the session in the red before ending higher by 1.13 points, or 0.08%, at 1349.99.

Did your eyes just glaze over? Mine did. Which is why I’ve decided that the only way to truly protect my investments at this point is to sell stocks, regardless of whether I’m doing it at a loss, and stick that money where I just might have a chance of not losing it: my mattress.

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