My Partner was Ace Greenberg's Right hand man but you keep getting your ideas from some pot-head living in gis mommies basement...

Alan "Ace" Greenberg was a legend on Wall Street. Greenberg arrived at Bear Stearns in 1949 with no experience in financial markets.

Starting from the bottom rung of the trading floor, Greenberg rose through the ranks to become CEO in 1978, a position he held until 1993.

Greenberg was executive chairman when Bear was forced to sell itself to J.P. Morgan during the financial crisis, a sad ending to an otherwise glorious career.

Although he had no formal background in securities or trading, Greenberg thrived on the trading floor. A former college football player, he was physically and mentally tough. He was known to have "nerves of steel" and a willingness to take big risks.

But Greenberg also was quick to cut his losses if a trade went in the wrong direction.

I'm thinking about "Ace" after learning that investors have pulled a record $135.5 billion from U.S. stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) this year. (That's according Refinitiv Lipper, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.)

This news, coming during a year when the S&P 500 has risen 24%, flies in the face of Greenberg's famous mantra: "Ride the winners, sell the losers."

It seems pretty simple...

• Ride the winners. If an investment is going up, don't sell it!

• Sell the losers. If an investment is losing money, dump it and move on!

And yet it's so hard to do.

Opportunity Costs: The Importance of Risk Management

Who among us hasn't ridden a stock down because we couldn't admit we were wrong?

When that happens, we're sure it couldn't be that our analysis is flawed. Some nefarious force must be manipulating the stock...

Either that, or we think Wall Street just doesn't see what we see yet. We tell ourselves it's only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, the principal investment gets smaller. We're so focused on it that we're unable to put that money into something better.

That missed chance at a better investment is called "opportunity cost."

But no one wants to spend their retirement thinking about what might have been...

Buy this one stock and you will make back every penny you lost

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