Investment "Logic"

Oh how the times change so easily.  It's become apparent that the stock market of 2017 is gone and what has taken its place is one filled with uncertainty and volatility.  Repeatedly over the last number of weeks we face wild swings as our President tweets, aids calm fears, and new complications arise.  It's important to note that for the last month and a half, we've truly been in the grips of a macro environment where everything from Presidential Tweets, Fed statements, Jobs reports, and other extraneous political and macroeconomic news controls the markets.  The one thing that could potentially put some calm to the market - earnings season - only started on Friday and despite what was a strong showing out of our biggest banks, what started as strong gains were wiped out and met with losses as people got prepared for a weekend which included fears of us dropping missiles on Syria (it happened Friday night and then called a "complete success"), as well as fea...

Once again, it's been awhile since I've provided an update or completed missing quarterly reviews.  Time to put in some extra work and get caught up.  To start out with, my portfolio has been under performing the S&P 500 this year.  As of today, I'm just over 2% behind the S&P 500.  I'm finding this to be quite frustrating and am trying to figure out what/how/why that is the case after last year's over performance.  I have yet to figure out the solution, as many of these companies are still just as great as they always have been, but they've been out of favor in the market for the last couple months.  This is potentially a temporary thing and a test to my conviction in the holdings. That said, there are other factors to consider as well.  The US Dollar has leveled off and shown a little strength with the rise of interest rates and lack of similar actions in other reasons, for example.  And to top that off, Trump just elected Larry K...

New year and it's time to get going on new weekly updates and a new batch of quarterly earnings reports.  Now that I've got the past year's review behind me, now it's time to start listening to fourth quarter and 2017 yearly earnings results.  We start on Tuesday when Citigroup announces their fourth quarter results.  Today, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo both reported.  There were significant tax losses and the trading divisions suffered because of low volatility.  There were also a fair amount of one-time charges,  which were expected to take advantage of tax loss benefits and other similar related events.  In general, the report was good for an institutional bank. NIM was higher and the forward outlook was postie, and with it, the bank stocks took off.  The markets will be closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, so Citi will be the next big bank report and I expect that we'll get another similar report and stock price results.  More s...

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...