Paradox - When to buy & when to sell a share?

Very few follow Buffett's advice. That's why it works.

And, of course, you've got to know when "everyone" else has stopped driving the price up (or down, as the case may be) so that you can jump in and do your thing.

It's worth noting that Warren Buffett is a value investor, not a trader. As such, it doesn't tell you much about technical analysis or trend following.

Instead, he's implying that when the market gets overly excited (overvalued) or panics (undervalued), there are opportunities for long-term profits, assuming you do your due diligence and have an opinion of what the fair value should be.

Note that it's difficult, if not impossible, to consistently time and beat the market and that the costs incurred by frequent trading eat away at your profits.

Like others have said, Warren is a value investor. He is not really interested in technical analysis or trend spotting. He buys a company that he has determined is undervalued, and waits for it to be overvalued.

He has a quick way of checking the fundamentals and presumably puts the company through a model that in a few minutes, will tell him whether the firm is undervalued.

Here is what I wrote for another question similar in nature:

Value investing involves looking at a firm's fundamentals and coming up with an "intrinsic value" per share. From there, you determine if the stock is under or over valued relative to market share price.

A disciplined value investor will sell when their models say that the stock is no longer undervalued. Any interest in that company after that is not value investing and is simply betting on the stock. Of course an investor will update models and change them appropriately throughout the investment period to make sure their models reflect current conditions.

There is no average or expected time it takes for an undervalued stock to appreciate. The idea with value investing is that the market will correct "mistakes" made in undervaluing a company. It could also be that the firm's fundamentals point towards a strong outlook (typically 10 years) and the market has yet to realize this.

Hope this helps you make sense of things!

Not at all. The time period where everyone is selling a stock and when everyone is buying a stock may be years apart. The exact dynamics of what's happening precisely when you buy and precisely when you sell won't significantly affect the profit or loss you take on a trade. What will, however, is whether you bought or traded the right stock, and that's what Buffett's advice is intended to help you do.

If everyone is buying a stock, that likely means its price is higher than its value. That's makes it a good stock to sell. If everyone is selling a stock, that pushes its price below its value. That makes it a good stock to buy.

The theory couldn't be more straightforward. You sell when you find better things to do with your money. Either sitting on your current account or other investments. It follows that that's the same reason to buy, ie because your money will be more productive allocated in an investment.

In the meantime — most of the time — the investment is left alone either compounding or generating cash via dividends which you have to allocate in turn or, in some cases (pure value investing), eventually realizing its fair value.

Allocating capital is simply done after an estimation of future returns of all the universe of possible investments at any given time for a somewhat arbitrary long period into the future.

Support and resistance levels is just witchcraft lingo.

Investors and traders have different perspectives on markets. If a security's price falls further from an initial buy, a trader may have a stop loss or just sell because the trend is downward, while a long-term investor would view that price fall as a buying opportunity.

A value investor's time frame is typically much longer than a trader's time frame (years vs. months), so you can't really compare what Buffett says to a short time frame. When Buffett says to buy low, sell high, buy in panic, sell in optimism, his price to buy is with respect to his evaluation of intrinsic value, not to technical patterns. Usually, short-term price movements are of no concern to value investors, unless a price move reflects new information that has a big impact on the investors' appraisal of value.