When to sell my value stocks?

I have managed to follow a set of rules to buy about 15 to 20 equities in my value portfolio.  This is clearly set out in my earlier post, setting up the criteria. But as you can see from my previous portfolio update here and here, I am not very good at selling the equities that i had bought.

Buying an equity or stock is an important part to investing. Similarly, selling them is an equally important part. Without selling, any capital gain will just remain as unrealized gain and you never know when the price will retrace leaving you losing your gain.

I have been reading around and it seems the common rule of thumb to sell an equity is if it does not meet the initial criteria which you had bought the equity for. That means in my case, if the equity does not meet the value criteria i should be selling it. However, I have been trying to execute that for months now with no success.

I realized that although the value criteria that was setup for buying a stock is a good indication of a well managed and undervalued company, it does not work very well for determining if the fundamental of the company had changed after i had bought it. For example, the price of the company could have increased such that the dividend dropped below 3% and does not meet the value criteria. To me this does not warrant a sell, if the company is still low on debt and still giving out dividend at low payout ratio, it is still a well managed company. It might just takes a while for the dividend to catch up with the price.

Using the value criteria as a sell indication might be too simplistic an assessment and I probably have to come up with another set of sell criteria. If anybody have any suggestion, please feel free to chip in.

Cheers! Happy Value Investing.