Friday, June 29, 2007

Reading assignments

Since I mentioned not having figured out good strategies and skills when making investing decisions, specifically related to purchases, and more specifically for ETFs, I am proactively trying to fix that.

Step one in the process is getting book smart. Currently on my bedside is John Bogle's Little Book of Common Sense Investing. Maybe I really wasn't expecting it, but the book reall is little....as in "hey look....somebody just got out of the pool...see how little......"; well, moving on, no comments yet on what I think about the content yet, I am just a few chapters into it. Besides, I do have a day job writing software (which incidentally I should be doing right now....oh well).

The other book is still in my Amazon queue.....Understanding Exchange-Traded Funds by Jr. Archie Richards.

This dudn't make sense...............


So, after spending a reasonable amount of time trying to make sense out of this, a TheStreet.com TV report explaining the top 5 ETFs to short now (early june) including VFH, I still went ahead and got my portfolio as much VFH as my spare change would let me purchase.

The issue is that I tried to make sense of that report about a couple of times and did not make much progress. I really haven't read anything about why financials would be a bad sector to be buying right now. However, in my sense of the world, this was one of the few sector ETFs that is currently somewhere below a 52-week maximum. My portfolio needed it, so I bought. Simple.

In the bigger picture of things, this forms about 8% of my portfolio which to begin with is REALLY not very well diversified, but I am actively getting there. Till I get somewhere which is respectable enough to be shown to public, I will not publish it. Lets just say I am way too heavily concentrated on Developing Nations........

Maybe if I keep making decisions this way, I will form my own set of rules as to what defines a good time to buy an ETF. Hopefully the whole process is not too expensive.....

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

ETFs...ources

First, ignore the title for this post. I just didn't want to post another set of links with the title "some more links" again.

Moving on, I recently stumbled upon a great ETF information resource at ETF Trends. I am almost embarrassed to admit that I haven't seen it before. In addition to considering myself a "King Of Links" (a title I just gave myself some time ago when I analyzed my responses to a lot of queries and questions in all forms and realized that I begin most of my statements with the words "Wait...let me send you a link for that...."), I also have been doing all my investing in ETFs.

I have been using the well known ETF Connect most often and I have sometimes browsed on Yahoo!'s ETF page. The thing is, I really haven't needed to investigate ETFs in general as much as I have had to spend time just doing basic investing. So my lack of knowledge is justified....I guess.

Well, the King is resting now.............

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Waiting.........

It has been a while since I last made a purchase in my portfolio. Certainly the lack of cash for my investing experiments (I always max out my 401k contribution in addition to paying off more than my monthly dues for my HELOC and primary mortgage, so don't judge ;-)) has been a big factor. But so has my desire to time the market and wait for a correction. It has been a while since the last major correction, and when the last one happened, I did buy then.

As an avid investing student, I read as much as one can, but very rarely have I come across a decent article or book on how timing works with ETF investing. There have been some mentions on the basic rules of when to sell/stop the bleeding/cut-and-run.
1. Keep an 8% stop-loss on all ETFs.
or
2. Sell when it falls below the 200-day moving average.

But as far as buying into an ETF goes, I really have to figure out a strong strategy. My investing theory does not permit selling very often, so when I do buy, it has to be that special one.......:-). I have read a number of times that May-November are historically the worst times for the stock market. So technically I should be looking into buying sometime between now and November. It is almost end of June and all kinds of stocks are reaching new highs, some even closing in on six-year-highs. So, what do I do now? Buy and hope the rally continues? I don't have the discipline to be a $-cost-avg investor, so that is out of question.

What do I do? I am waiting........

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Own Sweet Home

I had started writing this blog with a (partly) selfish reason of getting some writing practice in the process.

You see, for a very long time, I used to think that I have the ability to organize information and present it in a manner that is optimal for reading. I did do well on most writing assignments back in school as well on most tests that required a non-objective representation of my knowledge. However, ever since I got started writing software code, this writing "skill" that I might have possessed seems to have deteriorated rather significantly.

So, I figured if I force myself to write this way (blog) about things (investing, finance and software) that might interest me, maybe I might get a bit better at this. I digress enough, but one of the things I have been doing recently is listen to Grammar Girl's podcast which is pretty good.

I mention all that above just to say that even though my intention has been to "write", here is another post that is pretty much just a dump of some links that I have been saving in my bookmarks until I figure out how to effectively use them.

I keep coming across these new and cool house searching tools and websites:
http://www.zillow.com/
http://www.trulia.com/
http://www.redfin.com/
http://www.cyberhomes.com/

http://realestate.yahoo.com/Foreclosures
- Search foreclosures by zip code

I haven't needed to use any of these because I had purchased a small home before the whole Web2.0 phenomenon hit the web. Nor am I looking into selling my place for a foresee-able future. I think it would be an interesting exercise to see how would I have done differently if I have these tools available. Maybe I should just look into buying an "investment home" with a much better arsenal of such resources?

Monday, June 4, 2007

Vacation

I was out on vacation for almost a week now. The image is one I took lying on a boat, listening to music and drinking beer.......you get the picture.

Anyways, so the reason for this post which is not particularly related to investing (I guess it could if you buy stocks of some of the online travel agents like orbitz and priceline), is because on my looong flight back I was thinking about all the online tools that I have stumbled upon over the last few years for finding great airline deals.

For a while, I kept a little list of bookmarks that I would go through before booking a flight. I would think that with so many options to search for great deals, I would have found something that actually looked like a deal at least once! I haven't had any luck, but maybe others have effectively found the best way to go about this?

Here is my list of sites that at some point or the other I have used without much success:

The old and the trusted:
http://www.orbitz.com/
http://www.expedia.com/
http://www.priceline.com/

The meta-searchers:
http://www.kayak.com/
http://farechase.yahoo.com/
http://www.trabber.com - Courtesy of Dan's comment. Thanks!

The new and the interesting searching tools:
http://farecast.com/
http://www.mobissimo.com/search_airfare.php
http://skybus.com/
http://www.yapta.com/