Fund managers are good at buying shares – but terrible at selling them

Buying shares can be tricky. But selling them can be even trickier – even the professionals don’t get it right. John Stepek investigates why, and explains how you can become better at selling stocks and shares.

Selling shares on a smartphone
(Image credit: © Getty Images)

Investing is a tricky business.

Finding promising opportunities in a broadly efficient-ish market is not straightforward. Doing the legwork to make sure that you haven’t missed anything is time-consuming. And then working out whether you’re paying a fair price or not – there are a lot of moving parts.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.