The folly of individual stock "price targets."
There's an often-used expression in the investment world that goes something like this:
"Getting into a stock is easy but you need to have an exit strategy... know when you are going to get out."
Most investors and many stock analysts translate this into a "price target" for their stock picks.
How sadly naive.
A price target by itself does absolutely nothing for you; it falsely attributes a price increase with a return to "fair value."
A stock's price is only a measure of what the current market consensus is. There's no reason to believe that a change
in price, up or down, to any degree, equals a more accurate measure of "value."
If you are going to engage in either trading or investing in individual stocks (I strongly discourage you from doing either), at least
come up with a sell trigger that is based on one or more intrinsic factors (other than price). Price-earnings ratio, future earnings estimates, balance sheet measures, etc.
Such triggers operate under the misguided assumption that stocks frequently and flagrantly trade away from their actual "value" (the value of anything is how much
someone is willing to pay you for it at that moment which is known as the "market price"), but at least they are based upon a logical construct (even if the premise is flawed).
"Of what use is money in the hand of a fool, since he has no desire to get wisdom?"
-- Proverbs 17:16
