Your getting ready to do big things and major moves. Keep it basic playa. Just keep saving. I rather you do that than lose what you worked hard for cause of a moment this market decides to act crazy. Just my two cents. Ace had a spot he put me on to if your trying to get something back from saving at a decent amount.
Assessing risk can be a difficult proposition. My preference is more for a āslow and steadyā approach that largely guarantees success over the long term.
I spent a few minutes looking at some of your past posts in this thread CD_Vision, and your emphasis on market timing is probably a terribly bad idea for the vast majority of people posting to this site.
whips up a batch of popcorn, holding the butter to the side
As for the question by Unreal. I think since youāre still new to the game of investing just stash the bread in the savings account. By the both of you having money saved away and your wife being a teacher is almost impossible not get a loan.
WIndustry
Iām still on the fence about this. I want to go in but also iām too nervous. Iāve looked up a few and nothing to pleasing.
REITs
Right now Iām on a serious research grind on these. A couple caught my eye but I want to see what a few others are about. I wish I have my notes on me, but I left those at work.
Youāre probably right, but few others have been posting. Iām glad to have you here, I think your opinions are valuable. We used to have an efficient market person some time ago but havenāt heard from them in a while. I got hammered on that Nintendo suggestion too. Iām still holding it, Iāve been cost averaging it out. The loss here is about 31%. Itās going to be a while before that works out for me. Clorox is my big win for the year, it just happened to be my largest holding when Carl Icahn came and made his fake offers to buy it. I sold after he made the 2nd offer.
As far as what you said about funds that have not beaten the S&P. By nature, just being a mutual fund that has to answer to the demands of shareholders and regulators puts them at a disadvantage. Iām not running a fund, and I donāt have the restrictions in place that a fund has. As far as diversification goes, Iām in more companies than I would prefer to be right now. I run two portfolios, one is diversified with 93 mostly passive income investments, and the other is much more concentrated with only 14 stock and bond holdings. Of that, just 7 companies including the before mentioned Nintendo take up more than 60% of the assets there.
Iām pretty sure youāre wondering what my fee structure is like at this point. Until February next year I am paying zero trade fees on the income portfolio. The others are at Zecco and I aim to keep costs at 2% or less of the trade. At some point Iāll bring all of this to Merrill Lynch and just always get free trades, itās something Iām looking forward to. For now I use the cash that the income portfolio generates to add to and cost average the large holdings, occasionally moving larger amounts of funds (Like I did this week) when I think there are better opportunities to take advantage of. When I get paid I just split the money across whatās down the most and what I have the least of.
I have very little churn in either portfolio. I manage position sizes, but itās rare that Iāll actually completely sell a position. Where I was prompted to make the big sale this week was that I had noticed a really large number of leveraged investments were starting to fall in my income portfolio. I wanted to buy really heavily, but didnāt want the purchases to be on borrowed money. I figured there was no need to add risk on top of risk.
If rates stay low for a while you should get some very good returns on M-REITs. NLY and ANH stand out to me. Those two are agency guaranteed so youāre not going to need to worry about the underlying mortgages going bad, and Annaly has been at this game a pretty long time. CIM is putting out a ludicrous yield right now if you think that the Fed wonāt be tightening for a while to come. Iām in that camp but I am keeping that position very small.
In terms of higher quality commercial REITs I have always liked O. I like that they donāt use debt to buy new properties.
I find that people do really well by buying the stuff Iām down a lot on, heh. In that case, GOV might be a sound purchase.
Youāre probably defining risk in the sense of market volatility, in the sense that what goes down must come up, and youāre going to find thatās frequently not the case. If youāre going to start putting money into the markets, then you need to be prepared to add more if what youāre buying isnāt working out. If your time horizon to save up this house money is less than 15 years Iād say avoid this plan.
On the opposite side, if you define risk as in you have a real chance of losing everything you invested because the company sucks, then donāt do it. Donāt ever do this.
Series I savings bonds from treasurydirect.gov have a decent current interest rate, can never lose principal, have zero trading fees and are inflation adjusted. I think theyād work great for this purpose.
Right now the plan is simply savings account, however I hate āhow littleā money we are working with compared to what we want and tied to the fact that I want to move ānowā (I HATE where I currnetly live) - so savings is good an all, but Iām thinking about how much weāll be putting away monthly and canāt help but wonder what would be the best way to grow it over the next couple/few years.
- :bluu:
While I truly believe the US is going to see much better days in that timeframe, thereās no way anyone can promise you that. If you absolutely canāt keep yourself out of the markets, take Geoās advice and just add to an index fund gradually. VTI is Vanguardās Total Market index, they have a reputation for very low expense ratios, but maybe he knows one with lower expenses? Everyone I know whoās found anything faster always had it collapse back in on itself before they sold, or lost even more when they switched to something else.
For Godās sake man, donāt day trade with your house money. You buy and hold and thatās all.
Just consider for a moment whatās really occurring out in the markets. You are buying or selling assets to someone else on the idea that the underlying company will return a certain amount of profit over the course of itās entire operating history. No serious business sets itself up with the intention to run for āa few yearsā. Even if you find the next Facebook or Google or whatever, youāll end up paying way more than itās worth, which is what really adds to your risk.
A little bit later today Iāll be putting my orders together for what will be bought tomorrow, so you could take a look at some possible crisis buying ideas.
anyone here ever go to zero hedge?
Thereās a little too much going on there to really be useful. It seems suitable for traders, but I would think that if they were actually taking the time to stop and read everything coming through there they wouldnāt have time to watch what their trades are doing. Iām also not keen on the numerous authors who have anarchist ideals.
I had originally put up a post detailing the things I bought yesterday but removed it. Everything went up on the day, but as you know today is back down. Iām still happy with the purchases, I still bought at 1500 points down, and my income still went up 30% with the size of the purchase.
I have no idea what the market is going to do in the near term. I do know that companies have more cash on hand, that those who need to get new financing can do it more cheaply than ever, and that basically we have the ability to solve problems here. I also believe that the rest of the world will work to solve theirs, so I am going to continue to buy as much as I can. Anyone who wants it can PM me for a list of all of the companies in my income portfolio.
When are you going to learn that market timing is a fools game? Not only is the market only marginally different than a non-deterministic system, itās also a zero-sum game. You simply cannot compete with the investment banks and other institutional traders.
My total wealth including 401ks which I only use index funds to control has increased in size by 350x over since 2006. In my individual accounts I get paid 50 times every month now, and every month those checks get bigger. If I have a soft spot I can quickly direct cash to where I need it. I win either way, either I am increasing in capital gains, or my income increases when there are pullbacks. You know how it works, you just have less personal involvement, and youāre ok with that, I get it.
Iām not concerned at all with how well the investment bankers are doing. A fraction of a penny difference in the size of my purchase is hardly meaningful. Let the day traders deal with that, itās not my problem.
Going from $1 to $350 is 350x 
The value of your net worth actually says zero about your investment performance.
Look, you clearly have some understanding of the markets, but I bet that the content of your posts here flies way above the heads of the vast majority of people. Iād wager that it adds relatively little value and - like I said earlier - could be dangerous for them to try and emulate. So, I wonder why you do post, other than self-aggrandizement perhaps? Just calling it like I see itā¦
Maybe. But I also know people have read books like āA Random Walk Down Wall Streetā and ignore that, too. Youāre right, Iām knowledgeable, I post about what I know. People are out there looking for advice other than everything youāre doing is wrong and just quit trying. I want to get out there and let people know that if theyāre willing to put the work into it, they can have great results. And if theyāre not, well they can do almost nothing and still have pretty good results like you as long as they are patient 
Good job calling me on the 350x comment, lots of people miss that. I canāt quote you hard numbers, but it has been in a range near 60% annually. I get weekly reports from Mint.com and Wikinvest and theyāll say I did such and such against the S&P or whatever, but the programs get confused because of all of the cost averaging I do. They do not account for dividends, and also lose track if I sell something and buy into another position. Gainskeeper, the software that Zecco uses to rank itās members is an absolute joke, it gives me an average loss of 67% but ranks me in the top half of all of their traders there which makes me giggle a little bit every time I see it.
What I can tell you with certainty is that I get paid a lot more than I did even one year ago, and I like that a lot. I do use a spreadsheet for one purpose. Instead of tracking monthly account value, I track dividends received. If youāve taken algebra and you recall what the graph of compound interest looks like, youāll have some idea of where my total returns are going. The best year I had of any was 2008. I was extremely well prepared for that, when the markets started sliding I just went absolutely nuts buying every great company I could that was value priced. The growth of the accounts are slowing down now, because the new money I add in from the job I work is a smaller and smaller percentage of cash coming in.
Of course, every time I start getting worried that everything might get overpriced, we have a correction, which is great! This pullback is showing a lot of the same characteristics that I saw then, but companies really are in way better shape today. I have no fear at all buying right now. And if this really is a zero sum game, then Iām stacking the odds in my favor every time I buy lower. With the little deleveraging issue I had to deal with I liquidated my entire bond position, but rates are so low right now that itās hard to justify owning them anyway. If I had no margin at the time I almost certainly would have bailed on it this week.
Whatās your day job?
Iām passing the time as a pharmacy technician. Iām closing in on a finance degree and will probably go after a specialty in accounting fraud.
Thatās cool - follow your dream.
Doing what I can. Iāve found a real niche in the mid and small caps fishing out high yielding but low trading volume companies. Everyone and their mom who is trying to learn value investing is copying Warren Buffett, but youāre not going to beat the markets buying his companies anymore because theyāre now such huge parts of the market. In the meantime, whatās happened is there are hundreds of these other companies out there that are not āwonderfulā, but merely āpretty goodā, and they are just being ignored and selling super cheap, while I sit here and get paid huge dividend yields. Theyāre not focused enough to eliminate competition, and theyāre way too small for Berkshire to come buy them whole anymore.
When interest rates rise, this landscape is going to change. So Iām playing the interest rate curve right now. If Iām really timing the market, then itās on a bet that Iāll be in enough large caps by that time to not be hurt by it. At that point Iāll start buying up a huge bond position again, and weāll start this whole cycle of boom and bust all over. God bless the Fed.