The Stale Position Review

Every position started as a fresh decision at some point. The problem is that most positions do not get re-decided — they just sit, and a position that has quietly stopped being a good idea looks exactly the same on the screen as one that is still a great idea, because both show up as the same line with the same P&L color. The stale position review is the scheduled discipline of asking, name by name: if I did not already own this, would I buy it today, at this price, at this size?

Why "it hasn't hit my stop" is not enough

A stop-loss catches a thesis that is actively getting worse. It does nothing for a thesis that has simply stopped mattering — the catalyst played out with no move, a competitor made your edge irrelevant, or you have just held the name so long you have stopped actively thinking about it. None of those trigger a stop. All of them are exactly what the stale review exists to catch, because the position is neither winning enough to scale out nor losing enough to cut — it is just sitting there, occupying capital and a concentration-cap slot that a better idea could use.

A practical trigger, rather than "I have a bad feeling," is time and dispersion: any position held longer than your average holding period with no meaningful move either way, or any position where you cannot currently state which thesis leg is still unresolved and why it has not resolved yet.

Worked example

At the weekly review, a trader lists every position with days-held and a one-line current thesis status:

Name	Days held	Move since entry	Thesis status
Alpha Corp	12	+18%	On track, two legs still open
Beta Inc	61	+2%	Catalyst passed 6 weeks ago, no reaction
Gamma Ltd	8	-4%	Within normal noise of stop
Delta Co	74	-1%	Cannot state current thesis

Alpha and Gamma are not stale — one is working, the other is inside expected noise on an active thesis. Beta and Delta are: Beta's catalyst has already happened and the market shrugged, meaning the thesis as written is essentially closed, while Delta has been held so long the trader can no longer articulate why. Neither triggered a stop. Both are candidates for exit or a hard re-underwrite, freeing capital and concentration-cap room for ideas the desk currently has higher conviction in.

The discipline is the schedule, not the trigger

The reason this needs to be a calendar item rather than something you do "when a name feels off" is that stale positions do not feel off — that is precisely what makes them stale. A position you look at every day stops registering as a decision at all; it becomes furniture. Putting every position through the same one-line re-underwrite on a fixed schedule is what surfaces the ones that have quietly become furniture.