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.

Stock rankings 1 month in...

One month into my stock simulation I have to say I’m really surprised to have done this well! I’ve outperformed my 401(k) and the market indexes by a wide margin. I’m sure my professor would say that my returns aren’t sustainable, and that is probably true. Still, this has motivated me to start saving a little more so that I can try to put some real money to work. We get 100 trades for the entire semester, and I’ve used 75, so I won’t have the opportunity to play as much in November. The rankings below show the top 22 out of 61 participants (click on the image to see it full size). Someday I will be looking at a real portfolio worth that much!