Foresthill Bridge Adventure

Sure, this was a few months ago, but that's pretty much where I left off. One night we hiked a picnic from Hwy 49 at the American River over to the Foresthill Bridge. We found a slug and lots of graffiti! Here are some of the pictures:

House Addition, New Sprinklers, Keeping the Economy Going!

Filling in the Gaps, Random Selection

Here's a random sample of pictures from the last few months to fill in the gaps, so to speak. More to come in the following days, including the house remodel, our hike to the Foresthill bridge, Carmel/Monterey vacation last week, and the newest pics from today are our new puppies!!!

Kinda Recent Pics

Investing Ideas

My apologies to those who come here only for pictures of cute babies! Those are forthcoming, but I had a few thoughts I was sharing with Josh that I wanted to post.

As a quick background, I have been investing more or less (mostly less) since about 2002. Along with my 401(k), I created an account with ShareBuilder back in the day and invested a little bit when we could afford it. Personal Finance has always been an interest of mine, and I have read many books about it. Then over my last year of school I started to learn some pretty cool techniques for analyzing investments and I gained practical experience through a stock market simulation. Since graduation I have started applying some of that so-called knowledge and trading more actively through my ShareBuilder account. It has been fun and enlightening as I am learning more of the "rules of the road" in investing. Like when I sold a position in order to buy something else and found out the SEC forces you to wait 3 days for your funds to settle. My favorite investment is oil. I feel like I have been following it for so long as a detached non-investor that I have a rational view of the factors surrounding the supply and demand sides. I also like dividends because I'd rather have my investments pay me now than later. Anyways, I'm not writing a novel here, but I wanted to provide some background.

I ran across a site with a few good articles as resources in ETF trading: http://www.dailymoneyadvice.com/investing-oil-natural-gas-etfs/

That links specifically to an article about oil trading and I am really interested now in DXO as my long play in oil rather than USO. I went almost all in with USO this week and it paid off today with an 8.4% jump!! With DXO I can put half as much in and get about the same leverage in oil, and keep the rest in a S&P 500 index paying a healthy dividend. That said, I think this crazy rally has to run out of legs soon, so I am going to sell tomorrow and let the market play out while we are in Monterey.

The site also has articles focused on income portfolios, which is my philosophy for the Roth IRA (I am interested in the TIPS-based ETF). There is another article about ETFs for investing in currency.

Enjoy! And I hope you don't mind my occasional musings on investing that are certain to come again.

Quick Bragg Update

I clearly haven't been absorbed by the blogosphere lately, but here I am and I will do a quick update for family and friends that we don't see too often.

Over the last few months here are a few highlights: I graduated from Sac State, Anika was baptized, we added on to the house, and Mae is crawling. Aubrie, Eva and Mae are at preschool 3 times a week, Anika and Cade are crazy readers and they are doing great. I am happy to be out of school and more focused at work. Cade just started baseball. Anika has a talent show coming up at school and she will be performing "Respect" with 2 of her friends. We are having mucho fun with the extra space in the house, and we love Ikea. It is a beautiful time of year with mild sunny days, and the trees and flowers starting to bloom.

Life is good in Newcastle! Yet I know that many are experiencing hardships in their lives. Consider this quote:

“No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.”

A Day at the Beach