How to safely exit a falling security?
"If the stock is below its purchase price, there is no way to exit the position immediately without taking losses. Since presumably you had Good Reasons for buying that stock that haven't changed overnight, what you should probably do is just hold it and wait for the stock to come back up. Otherwise you're putting yourself into an ongoing pattern of ""buy high, sell low"", which is precisely what you don't want to do. If you actually agree with the market that you made a mistake and believe that the stock will not recover any part of the loss quickly (and indeed will continue going down), you could sell immediately and take your losses rather than waiting and possibly taking more losses. Of course if the stock DOES recover you've made the wrong bet. There are conditions under which the pros will use futures to buffer a swing. But that's essentially a side bet, and what it saves you has to be balanced against what it costs you and how certain you are that you NOW can predict the stock's motion. This whole thing is one of many reasons individuals are encouraged to work with index funds, and to buy-and-hold, rather than playing with individual stocks. It is essentially impossible to reliably ""time the market"", so all you can do is research a stock to death before making a bet on it. Much easier, and safer, to have your money riding on the market as a whole so the behavior of any one stock doesn't throw you into a panic. If you can't deal with the fact that stocks go down as well as up, you probably shouldn't be in the market."
Freezing your credit should be the default configuration.    EDIT:  More info on Why.  Basically you're adding a password to your credit report access.  https://www.privacyrights.org/consumer-guides/identity-theft-monitoring-services  4. Is there a low-cost alternative to monitoring services?  The best low-cost alternative to credit monitoring services is a security freeze. A security freeze locks your credit files at the three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) until you unlock your file with a password or PIN. The freeze stops new accounts from being established by imposters because potential creditors are not able to check your credit report or credit score, the standard procedure when financial accounts are opened. Any potential creditors’ requests for access to your credit files will be denied.  However, a security freeze cannot stop misuse of your existing bank or credit accounts. You still must check the monthly statements on your current accounts for any erroneous charges or debits.  Generally, you will pay no more than $30 for a lifetime of security freeze protection. In some circumstances (identity theft victims and senior citizens in some states), this protection may be free.  With a security freeze, your credit reports cannot be seen by prospective creditors, insurance companies, landlords, utilities, or for employment screening. However, you may lift the freeze when necessary to allow a company to check your credit report. This is easily done by means of a password. It is important to realize that a security freeze does not prevent existing creditors from seeing your credit report.   While a security freeze may be the best available deterrent to new account fraud, it may not be the best solution for everyone. It can be cumbersome for individuals who frequently apply for credit, are contemplating a new mortgage, or who plan to change jobs. On the other hand, a security freeze is particularly well-suited for seniors who are no longer in the market for new credit. And a freeze provides protection for individuals affected by data breaches involving Social Security numbers, as well as victims of identity theft or mail theft. For a more complete discussion of the pros and cons of security freezes, read this report in Consumer Reports.  Brian Krebs' post How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Security Freeze is a primer on what you can do to avoid becoming a victim of identity theft.  Fees, supporting documentation, and procedures for placing a security freeze vary from state to state and among the three credit reporting agencies. The web sites of each of the credit reporting agencies provide state-specific instructions for placing a security freeze. The websites of each of the credit reporting agencies provide state-specific instructions for placing a security freeze.  Equifax Experian TransUnion "In Frank Abagnale's book ""Art of the Steal"" the author talks about how to set up a bank account for safe wire transfers. He recommends setting up an account at your regular bank and specifying that money can be transferred into that account from another bank, and out to your regular account only. You are then free to give the necessary transfer information to whomever you want, knowing full well they can't take money out. This guy should know what he's talking about since he's an ex-confidence man legitimately working as an American security consultant." "Is there any way out from letting the money disappear into a black hole? But that is the whole point of insurance; the ""black hole"" = the insurance company.  That's how they stay in business.  You are giving up your money to them, but you get something in return:  a guarantee of financial rescue if something happens to you medically.  Considering how much health care costs can cost in the U.S., this is not insubstantial. To the degree that you might be able to divert some of that money out of the ""black hole"" and back into your pocket, or a charity, would be equivalent to reducing your premium costs.  There are few ways to do that, but none too significantly.  E.g., sometimes plans have health programs that customers can participate in and get a small discount, etc.  But for the most part, you are stuck.  Welcome to the U.S. Health Care System. One tiny tip:  see if your school offers a free flu shot this fall; many do, it seems, so there is $15 saved.  The school's human resources office would probably know about this." SUBREDDIT RULES This security forum is oriented towards private white hat security professionals. NO ADVERTISING. Want to share information or resources? Message The Mods to find out how! You would rather build a relationship with the /r/Security community than get banned! Please message the mods before posting links to your own projects or if you have any questions about /r/security's advertising policies "First, it's much safer to be shorting stocks over $5 than stocks under $5.  I use 3 indicators to show that a stock has topped out and about to drop. Key is the timing cause the initial drop is often the biggest. More close you get in at the top, the higher the risk. Using 1D Charts ONLY:   - MACD Indicator:  I use the histogram, when it reaches a peak height, and the next day it is down 1 ""Step"". If you wait til the MACD lines cross, you are pretty late IMHO.  Need to get in earlier. Timing is everything.   - RSI(15) - Needs to topped out and above 67 meaning, ""Over bought""  - Do not buy when RSI is high above 70. Often stocks go on a Run up when RSI is over 70!   - I use Stoch RSI or CCI to confirm my status on RSI. I like to see that all 3 indicators agree. This gives me a 75% chance that the stock will drop. It may take a day or 2.. so you need patience." Key point here is to remember that GBP isnt falling a lot, it has fallen a lot already.  If you havent liquidated your position in pounds by now at a higher rate I would personally not bother switching to another currency right now.  The pound is near its 10 year low(nearing 2008 capital 'C' Crisis levels) and despite what fear mongers may short the market for, the sun will shine after Brexit as well. Britain has a solid economy and that hasnt fundamentally changed, so even if the pound hasnt seen the absolute periodic lowest point yet(which may still come as brexit talks become more prevalent/near their end), it will eventually pull back up.  In essence, you have more to lose acting in panic now than waiting to exchange for a better than today's rate at some point until the eventual Brexit(probably in March 2019) or at any point afterwards(if you wont be needing those savings when you move). Learn how to do the job and don't be afraid to step in and help out. If you never do this people will assume you think you're too good to do the work they do and they won't respect you or your authority.   Being good at something gives you natural authority and people will seek you out for advice/direction.  Trust your employees to do their jobs until they prove otherwise. Management is a relationship and relationships are based on trust. If you want to be untrusted the very best way to go about it is to show you don't trust the other person. If you're not trusted then no one is going to follow your untrustworthy advice/direction.  Stay calm even when things are going terribly. Even if you're freaking out on the inside it's best to show a calm front. If you're constantly on edge it will amplify through your employees and a chaotic workplace is obviously less efficient overtime. If you lose your cool apologize sincerely.  Be positive. Always have something good to say about something and employees will more likely be able to stay positive. If you're negative all the time then again this is going to amplify through employees and if everyone is gossiping and complaining all day efficiency is going to go down.   Be assertive and explain why. Sometimes you can take input from employees and negotiate, but sometimes you just have to tell them what to do and it's important to include why because if you include the why people are much more likely to comply as well as to remember what you said.  All these things may not make you liked. If your goal is to be liked then quit because all bosses aren't liked by many employees. You will be more likely to be effective and at least respected. "**Reposted so you don't have to look at silly GIFs for 50% of the article.**   Sophie is a physical penetration tester and information security consultant. She specializes in social engineering security assessments including physical, voice (vishing) and text (phishing). She consults in remediation and prevention of security incidents through creation of policy and procedures, as well as customized training for your individual office culture. Prior to working in infosec, Sophie was a journalist, photographer, and a mom.  Hello! My name is Sophie and I break into buildings. I get paid to think like a criminal.  Organizations hire me to evaluate their security, which I do by seeing if I can bypass it. During tests I get to do some lockpicking, climb over walls or hop barbed wire fences. I get to go dumpster diving and play with all sorts of cool gadgets that Q would be proud of.  But usually, I use what is called social engineering to convince the employees to let me in. Sometimes I use email or phone calls to pretend to be someone I am not. Most often I get to approach people in-person and give them the confidence to let me in.  My frequently asked questions include: What break-in are you most proud of?  What have you done for a test that you were the most ashamed of?  What follows is the answer to both of these questions.  A few months ago, a client had hired me to test two of their facilities. A manufacturing plant, plus data center and office building nearby.  First step: open source intelligence, or OSINT. I look at maps, satellite images, study what I can of their delivery and supply schedules, and so on.  The manufacturing facility looked like a prison. No windows, heavy iron gates, no landscaping. Generally a monstrosity of architecture.  This facility had armed guards, badge readers, biometric security controls and turnstiles at every entrance.  I remember thinking, ""It's got to be hell to work in there. I wonder if I can use that…""   One thing was for sure… The chances of tailgating (following behind an employee with valid credentials) into this building were next to non-existent.  I was going to have to get down and dirty with my social engineering.  First stop: LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn is my best friend. The more information you have on your LinkedIn, the more options I have.  I have several fake LinkedIn profiles that you are probably connected to.   I scour profiles of employees who work at these facilities, and cross-reference them to other social media sites. And I find a lovely young woman who I'm going to call Mary.  Mary was a brand-new hire working as an assistant at the manufacturing facility. Mary had a public Facebook account too.  On Mary's public Facebook account, she documented all of her family's adventures.  Side note: Now I know where Mary went to high school, her mother's maiden name, the names of her pets, etc.  Answers to those ""security questions"" you use to reset your passwords are very easy to find if you aren't careful with that information.   Not to mention that now I know where Mary works, where her kids go to school, where they vacation…I could go on. Scary stuff.  This is not an advanced investigation. I'm not a private investigator and I don't have the resources of the NSA. But I can do a lot of damage with simple methods.  Most notably to me, there were photos Mary posted of her time volunteering with a certain maternity support center.  Her passion for children and caring new moms was very plain. So of course, I took advantage of it.   For this assessment I played two roles. For the first, I spoofed my phone number to make it look like it was coming from the company's headquarters.  I called the front desk of the manufacturing facility and was transferred to Mary. ""Hi Mary!"" I said, ""My name is Barbara.""  ""I am a project coordinator with facilities management. We are renovating a few of our facilities. We are sending an interior designer out to you tomorrow so she can put together proposals to update your space!""   Mary replied, ""Well that's great! But why the short notice?"" I could feel her getting suspicious, so I pulled out my trump card…  *Sigh* ""Well Mary… You really should have heard from me sooner. I've just been so overloaded at work…I feel like I can't catch up, and to top it off the baby is due in 6 weeks. If my boss finds out I messed this up he's going to flip.""  I was really getting into this, voice shaking. (Yes, I know, I'm a terrible human being.)  She cut me off, ""Oh hunny, hunny it's ok. We will work this out! Tell me about the baby! Is it your first? Boy or girl?!""  Our Mary was committed at this point. Not because she is stupid, but because she is a good person. She wanted to help me.  We talked babies and birth plans for a while (never pick a pretext you can't speak about at length.)  Mary took down the name of the ""designer"" who was coming by the next day and we said our goodbyes. Mary could have saved her company a lot of heartache by simply verifying that I was who I claimed to be. (Just to be clear here, I would never give out Mary's real identity. I'm not totally heartless. This could have happened to anyone. She has not been fired.)  I showed up the next day as ""Claire"" with a fictional architecture firm that I had made business cards and a website for. My alter-ego Barb had done most of the leg work for me. When I arrived, Mary and her boss were waiting for me with smiles. I shook hands all around and handed them the business card I printed out the night before. I was given a visitor badge and the red carpet was rolled out.  I gained rapport with the staff there by asking them to tell me what they wanted in an office space. They were so excited. I might have claimed to be on the team that put together the Google offices…(Yes, I am HORRIBLE. This is my inner demon child.)  ""You want a standing desk? New chairs over here?! Ergonomic keyboards for everyone! Let's look at swatches!""  We became best buds. I was given complete and unaccompanied access to the facility where I stayed for several hours.  I gained network access and stole several thousands of dollars in physical primitives by picking my way through cheap locks (credit to Deviant Ollam for the rad lockpicking animations.)   This client had been pretty confident that I wouldn't get into either facility, much less be able to hit both in a short time span. So the timeline was left to my discretion, but it was assumed that I would need to fly to the area twice.  I didn't see the need in burdening them with two round-trip expenses.   I went back to Mary's office and said, ""Well I think I have what I need from here. How do I get to the office center?""  She looked at her watch and said, ""It's almost lunch time. I'll take you there!"" A whole group of us piled into the parking lot, and they took me to a nearby taco shop. That's right. My Marks took me to get tacos… I love my job.  After lunch they drove me to the offices and a few of them came in with me to show me around.  I took FOREVER looking around this office space, and eventually they said their goodbyes because they had to go back to work. They had a strict policy of escorting visitors. But I had been seen walking around with trusted insiders so no one questioned me.  I was free to take my time. I made myself at home. My main objective at this site was to weasel my way into private corner offices.  When I accomplished my goals, I tracked down my point of contact's office. This is the man who hired me in the first place. This is the best part of every job.   Steve was there, hard at work when I disturbed his groove by knocking on the door. He glanced up, ""Hi there, can I help you?""  I smiled. ""Hi Steve! I'm Sophie from Sincerely Security. It's nice to meet you in-person!""  I will never forget the look on his face… Pure gold. ""Who?.... Wait, what? How? How did you get in here?!""   We stayed in his office and talked for a long time. I went over exactly the steps that could have prevented my success. First of all, the desire to help others is human and natural. We don't want to discourage that.  Second, I'm sure they did have some sort of policy that required visitors to check in showing government issued identification, but they weren't following it.  We also need to post by every computer, phone and door: ""TRUST, BUT VERIFY.""  An employee who does their homework can ruin my day.  Third, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.   Is your company going to hire the team who designed Google's offices? Magic 8 ball says no.  Lastly, the team who took me to the second location should have found someone else to escort me through the building.  I've been doing this job for a couple years now, and almost every job is a variant of this story. Very rarely do I go through an entire assessment without some sort of social engineering.  There are ways to protect yourself and your company from attacks like this. I think it starts by sharing stories like these, and educating and empowering each other to be vigilant." You might want to consider how much effort mitigating this risk is worth. For example, having homeowner's insurance and sufficient documentation of your valuables is probably enough to satisfy your fears if they are based on simply losing your property.  In the end is there really any benefit in living like you don't have money in an effort to keep people stealing it from you? That said, One piece of good advice I have heard for how to avoid encouraging robbers is to avoid putting boxes for expensive items (e.g. electronics) out by the trash until the morning they pick it up. No need to advertise that you just bought a super expensive home-theater system. I agree with you.  But I think you are missing my point.  It is the affect on other CEOs and how they respond to fixing their own security messes.  Because they will want to avoid a nearly 1/3 drop in their stock price.     I actually work in the security related industry and at a company were security was actually something we sell.  We were breeched a few months back. It was in the news world wide How we were breeched was well known and even brought up as a risk for several years by the engineers including myself.    It was ignored because it e didn't deliver immediate observable benefit or differentiation  to the customer.   But once it happened oh boy.   Affecting the CEO's pocket book directly is the best way that these security holes get addressed. "Eventually, you'll end up buying a stock at or near a high-water mark.  You might end up waiting a few years before you see your ""guaranteed"" $100 profit, and you now have $5K to $10K tied up in the wait.  The more frequently you trade, the faster your money gets trapped. There are two ways to avoid this problem: 1) Do it during strong bull markets.    If everything keeps going up you don't need to worry about peaks...but then why would you keep cashing out for $1 gains? 2) Accurately predict the peaks.    If you can see the future, why would you keep cashing out for $1 gains? Either way, this strategy will only make your broker happy, $8 at a time." China was the only place that I've traveled to where they had built in privacy screens as you're going through security. One person at a time through the metal detector and once you pass through the metal detector you're in an area that has complete privacy. Nobody before or after the line can see you. In a way it's good if implemented in the USA but sometimes it makes me wonder how that can be abused. If the position starts losing money as soon as it is put on, then I would close it out ,taking a small loss. However, if it starts making money,as in the stock inches higher, then you can use part of the premium collected to buy an out of money put, thereby limiting your downside. It is called a collar. Personally, I have entry and exit signal generating functions, which also have sizing, stop and target functions...  E.g. based on some entry you have an optimal bet, take profit and stop loss.  Algorithmic execution is generally used for large orders to prevent walking the book. A CD ladder is an ideal way to hold your emergency funds and eke out a few more percentage points of return.  Buy CDs in denominations close to one month's expenses, and ladder 1 per month with 3, 6 or 12 month CDs (depending on your total cash allocation to emergency funds). By using a frequency that matches your available funds, in a best case scenario, you can perpetually roll over (or as your savings increase, extend to a longer frequency).  If you have an emergency, you have a month's expenses in cash or cash coming in within a month.