Stock Blog

As you may well know, I am an advocate of investing in individual stocks. Index funds are absolutely useful for certain investing situations - it’s what I currently have my IRA invested in. But the growth potential of individual stocks is huge. Not only that, but there’s something about investing in individual companies that really adds a lot of excitement to investing. What that excitement means is that you’ll be paying more attention to your investments, which in turn increases the likelihood... [Read More]

As I glance over at my box of drafts for this blog, I see about a half-dozen unfinished pieces on stocks, market timing, and personal finance. Why? Well, to be honest, it’s been hard to write about anything finance related for the past few months, with the way the market has been behaving. My introduction to the market began January 2007, which in retrospect was a pretty good time. The market took some dips in March and July, but it was still easy to make money until the end of the year.

The... [Read More]

The market had an excellent day yesterday, doing just well enough to convince me to move out of my 100% cash position and go ahead with a stock purchase. And that purchase was Crocs (CROX), maker of those funny, swiss-cheese looking shoes that you see all over the place.

Considering the fact that I have only been investing for a year and a half, I suppose I could go as far to call CROX my “heritage stock.” I’ve researched this stock more than any other, and have a certain fondness for it after... [Read More]

This is a response to this question:

I’ve been interested in stocks for the past few years and I’m finally looking to invest in some stocks. One thing that alot of investors recommend is to invest in companies you actually like. I was just wondering if this is a bad idea? I’ve also read about the importance of diversification - pick 5 stocks, all from different sectors, and gather information about said companies.

The companies I’m looking at are Costco and Chipotle. Both have expanded to my... [Read More]

(Click for big)

So it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, mostly because I still can’t find an easy way to dynamically display my portfolio online. So for now I’m back to taking screenshots of the spreadsheet I use to track it.

About two weeks ago, for the first time this year, my portfolio went from the red to the black, and I finally showed a profit! My portfolio currently has a gain of 3.63%, compared to -5.59% for the S&P 500. I am very happy to be outperforming that index by over 9... [Read More]

At the investment company I work for, their general approach to earnings is not to play them either way. Overall, I think this makes a lot of sense, because it often seems like a risky move to buy or sell a stock before it announces earnings in hope that it will move one way or the other.

So I really had to be sure before I spoke up on Wednesday’s stock meeting about Google. I should preface this by saying that even though I have been very happy with my portfolios (both real and paper) in the... [Read More]

After quite a bit of searching, I finally found a portfolio widget that looks like it will serve my purpose. I have placed it on the sidebar and will keep it updated whenever I make changes to my portfolio.

I should mention that the amount it shows me up (or down) is not entirely accurate as it is based off of my current holdings, not losses I took from sales at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, I can’t get it to take into account those losses for some reason.

Also, the actual amount of... [Read More]

I ran my weekly portfolio update this week and found I was down 6% since the end of the year. I am actually pretty satisfied with this. Why? Well, mostly because the S&P 500 and Dow are both down about 9.5%, and the Nasdaq composite index is down 13%.

My decent performance, at least in comparison to the major indexes, is due to three general changes I made to my portfolio: Completely avoiding growth stocks for the time being, trying to stay around 50% in cash , and investing in resources and... [Read More]

At the beginning of last year, I began my job at an investment advisory service. Though I had never been very interested in investments before, dealing with them in my everyday life spurned my interest forward. I went out and bought books recommended by personal finance blogs, such as A Random Walk Down Wall Street and The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.

I was promptly poked fun of by my coworkers.

Not because I was a neophyte in the investing world, but because I was reading books by... [Read More]

At the beginning of this week, the investment advisory service I worked for posted this notice to their subscribers:

“We believe yesterday’s deeper-than-expected Fed rate cut, along with the market’s super-strong reaction, has kicked off the market’s next bull run. What impressed us most was the significant power shown in the broad market; up volume on the NYSE totaled nearly 30 times that of down volume, while advancing stocks outnumbered decliners by more than 9-to-1. (We get our figures from... [Read More]