Duration risk

There has been much made over the years about the magic of “Rip Van Winkle investing”. We are told that the greatest of investors buy and hold long term and forget about it. From my experience if an investment goes south quickly if I do not immediately take a small loss I end up holding for a larger loss. With fixed investments where the dividend is the key, it does little good to get the dividend and pay taxes on the income and then take a loss on the investment. In cases of high yield oil stocks or REIT stocks this is commonplace. So. Duration has risk. If you could hold a stock for 15 days rather Han 90 days between dividends and got the dividend and then exited flat or with no gain it would appear that the actual yield would be 6 times the displayed yield. By cutting the duration the effective return improves vastly. The trick is to sell the position at no loss.