A simple, spelled-out plan for selling your AppLovin over time — with dials you can turn to make it more cautious or more patient. Nothing here happens on its own; it's for you and Ryan to decide.
Your situation, briefly. You own 6,807 shares of AppLovin, bought around $15. Today (~$392) that's roughly $2.7 million, nearly all of it profit. That's a lot of your money riding on one jumpy stock — it has been as low as $9 and as high as $733. The idea is to sell out of it gradually and on a rule, so you're not guessing or reacting emotionally.
Once a month, sell a piece of your AppLovin. How big the piece is depends on what the stock is doing that month — a bit more when it's high, a bit less when it's beaten down, and faster if it starts falling hard. Keep going until you're out — about two years. That's the whole idea. Here's exactly how it decides each month:
Same recipe every month. No predictions, no headlines, no panic — just the rule.
AppLovin is ~$404 — below its long-term trend line, with momentum sliding, and about 45% under its high. So the rule is in protective mode:
This updates as the stock and the market move. Nothing is done automatically — it's the suggestion to act on with Ryan.
The plan watches more than just AppLovin — it watches the neighborhood too. Two extra checks each month:
• The overall market (S&P 500). When the whole market is in a downtrend, a concentrated single stock like AppLovin usually falls harder — so in those stretches the plan sells faster. Right now the market is in an uptrend, so no extra push.
• AppLovin's ad/tech peers (Trade Desk, Meta, Google). If AppLovin starts badly lagging the companies it competes with, that's a warning specific to the stock — so the plan leans more protective. Right now AppLovin is about 10% ahead of its peers over three months, so no extra push. Worth knowing why: Trade Desk has fallen very hard this year, so part of being "ahead" is the peer group doing badly rather than AppLovin doing well.
You can turn each of these on or off with the switches below, and both charts redraw. Because they only act in rough stretches (busiest in the 2022 downturn), in calm or rising markets — like today — flipping them barely moves the line; their effect shows up most in the "Since IPO" window and in the spread of possible futures.
Slide the dial. The blue line explains the rule that setting follows; the boxes show what it has tended to mean — from testing over 83 points in AppLovin's real history.
Using the setting on the dial above (and the switches), here's exactly what the plan would have said to sell each month over the last ~15 months — and why. Change any control and this table updates.
Read this table as a rehearsal, not as your instructions. It imagines you had started the plan 15 months ago and had been selling the whole time — so by the last row it is working from a much smaller pile of shares than you actually own. The share counts in this table are not what to sell today. Your real number is in the green box underneath.
Pick a stretch of time. The chart shows what your money would have done under the setting on the dial above (gold) vs. just holding every share (gray). Notice how much steadier the plan's line is — that's the risk it takes off the table.
Nobody can predict AppLovin — so instead this runs 500 possible futures, built from how AppLovin has actually bounced around, starting today, under the setting on your dial. The shaded band is the middle 80% of outcomes (10th–90th); the line is the middle. Move toward the cautious end and watch the band get tighter — that's the plan trading away the wild high end for a lot more certainty.
These are illustrations of a range, not predictions — real markets can do things the past never showed. Values are before tax (tax lowers them all by roughly a third of the gain).
AppLovin isn't the first stock to crash hard and bounce back. Here are real ones that did — and a few that didn't — each with a much longer history, so you can see what came after a recovery like AppLovin just had. The point isn't "it always comes back." It's that these rides are wild, recoveries can take years (or never come), and the ones that made it did so on real, growing profits. The charts use a "ratio" scale so both the crashes and the giant recoveries fit in one view; the ● marks the bottom of the worst crash.
What this means for AppLovin. The encouraging part: AppLovin's profits have grown like the winners' did — from losing money to about $3.3 billion a year. That real business growth is what carried NVIDIA, Apple, and Amazon back to new highs. The sobering part: Snap — a fellow ad-tech company — grew its sales too and still never recovered, because it never turned a real profit. Nobody knows which script AppLovin follows. That uncertainty is the whole reason to sell down gradually and lock in some of this recovery, rather than bet everything on the comeback continuing.
| How you play it | Value vs. holding | Typical dip | Worst dip |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hold it all | 100% | −57% | −92% |
| Patient | ~64% | −29% | −81% |
| Balanced suggested | ~54% | −28% | −68% |
| Cautious | ~46% | −40% | −53% |
| Out now | ~19% | 0% | 0% |
"Value vs. holding" = how much of just-holding's after-tax value the rule tended to keep. "Dip" = the worst drop in your money while you're getting out. Holding scores highest on value only because AppLovin happened to soar — and you paid for it in those deep dips. There's no free lunch; it's a trade between value and peace of mind.
It's just the average price over the last 200 days — a slow-moving line. When today's price is above it, the stock is generally in an uptrend; when it drops below it and keeps sliding, that's often the start of a real decline. The plan uses that as its "sell faster now" trigger.
Maryland taxes this profit at about 34.75%. Selling in chunks across a few tax years keeps each year's profit under the surtax/bracket lines and can save real money (about $49,000 in one test). The catch: waiting longer means more time exposed to the stock's swings, which can cost more than the tax you save. A real trade-off, not a free win.
An exchange fund lets you contribute AppLovin shares into a diversified fund and get diversified exposure while putting off the tax (with a multi-year lockup). Donating a slice of low-basis shares to a donor-advised fund or charitable trust avoids the tax on that slice and gives you a deduction. These can pair with the monthly plan — e.g. move a chunk into an exchange fund and sell the rest on the rule.
Prepared by Ben (with his AI helper) for Mary Ann. This is to help you think and decide — it is not tax or investment advice; Ryan and your CPA sign off on anything you actually do. The numbers come from testing on AppLovin's real 2021–2026 history at Maryland tax rates; a few details (filing status, other income, your exact share lots) are still to confirm. Nothing here has been executed.