Investment "Logic"

Yesterday I sold my entire stake of the iShares MCI Eurozone ETF at a price of $43.825.  While I haven't been able to post my weekly summary due to technical problems, followed by a busy life, I had written that the picture for that holding has started to change pretty significantly.  First, there is a lot of Tariff talk going on.  The EU is starting to look to Tariff the US after we set tariffs on steel and aluminum.  This is taking a hit to the market, overall, and makes it difficult to see as much growth and momentum for European companies if they can't make as much off of selling product to the US.  The second big event was the appointment of Larry Kudlow as the President's Chief Economic Advisor.  Larry is well known for his stance on "King Dollar" or a strong dollar, which goes against this fund in particular, as it is unhedged and was chosen to take advantage of a strengthening Euro to Dollar.  Since all of these events haven't taken place, ...

Notes: Stock Ratings: 1 = buy at current stock prices, 2 = buy on a 5-10% dip in stock price, 3 = sell on a 5-10% increase in stock price, 4 = sell at current stock prices to raise cash.  Ratings are based upon 12-18 month outlook on stock direction and not necessarily related to moves I make due to financial positioning. The purpose of this discussion and review is to analyze the trades I made in 2017 - what went bad, what went well, and what's still undecided.  Hopefully we'll be able to glean some lessons from the experiences I've had and use those to become better in 2018 - so let's dig in.  Below are all of the trades I made in the year.  I'm going to try to break things down stock by stock, not trade by trade, but I'll do my best to keep all of this straight. 2017 Trades 2017 was a year of low volatility.  Throughout the entire year the market never pulled back more than 5%, though many individual stocks certainly did.  I did find m...

As 2017 wraps up, I want to take a brief moment to review my performance on the year and then talk about what I'm looking for in 2018. While my intent is to keep things short, it's important that I set a common base.   First, all gain/loss percentages discussed are based upon either feedback from my portfolio tracking software or by pulling up tickers on the  Morningstar  web site's performance tabs for YTD or 2017 numbers on performance.  Numbers I state have the chance of being off a few percentage points compared to reality.  I will be doing various comparisons of my stocks against the performance of the S&P 500, excluding dividends.  Additionally, I'll be comparing the performance against the sectors which the stocks are a part of.  To do this, I'm using Spider (SPDR) ETF index funds, as these ETFs are known to track extremely close to each of their respective sectors.  These sector performances likely include the ...

As we enter the final quarter of the calendar year, we prepare for third quarter earnings reports season.  Pepsico announced their results earlier this week and you can see my thoughts on that here .  The portfolio continues to perform well, but you'll notice a few things have changed since last time as well  First, I sold the remaining investment I've put into ON semiconductor.  As such, I've inserted a new icon into my blog to identify stocks where I'm playing with the house's money, which you'll see noted just before we talk about my rankings.  You'll continue to see me do some research an post on the stock, but my homework will not necessarily be as deep as it has been in the past.  . Since I was no longer invested in a tech stock, I wanted to find the right opportunity to get reinvested there and happened to come across the stock of Apple at just the right time, seeing it drop significantly from new highs after people started worrying about iPho...

The major market indexes took a bit of a hit today and I thought I'd take a quick review of my portfolio in co ordinance with that action and how it may affect things.  First, I feel we are seeing two major news events impact the markets right now.  The primary focus is related to North Korea and the potential that they just tested a hydrogen bomb.  While the situation and potential scenarios are certainly alarming, I currently do not see them having an impact on my portfolio looking out twelve to eighteen months.  Times like this typically draw panic and it's better to be prepared to handle that panic than it is to join in the foray.  The second event is Hurricane Irma forming into a Category 5 storm in the Atlantic.  Current path projections have the storm most likely going right up through the Caribbean and through Florida and some of the southeast coast.  Category 5 hurricanes produces mass amounts of damage and has the potential to rival that ...