fredP:

 Jerry:

“Are you in agreement that selling equity at a loss is a losing strategy?”

Not at all !

Over the years I’ve been stopped out of  many stocks, sold ETFs, and a few mutual funds that continued to underperform but made up the difference and profited very well on the investments that were beating or kept pace with the market.

 There is not a single success story that I know of that hasn’t got out of  bad investments at one time or another and nobody in his or her right mind rides a stock down to zero. IMO controlling and limiting one's losses is the most important factor in building wealth, the rest is easy.

Fred - I agree with some of what you say. Individual stocks are risky business and may indeed go to zero. Some sort of stop loss may make some sense here. I don't take the risk on individual stocks for that reason. On mutual funds, if you are talking of managed funds, then yes, at some point you give up on a manager I suppose. My approach as you may know, involves primarily index funds. With this approach, I fully expect some market segments to underperform while others outperform. That's a given with a slice and dice index portfolio. To sell the underperformers, particularly at a loss makes no sense to me. I often refer to the Callan chart to remind myself that returns are cyclic and to play that game is market timing which can be detrimental to one's financial well being. :-)