Talk to Hal.

Members present: Brian, Bickford, Danak

SPY is currently doing pretty well, and we were wondering if we wanted to see if it is going to go higher or do we want to lock in our profits. If there is some downturn on the horizon, when do we want to get out? Granted, SPY is an index of the S&P 500, which means that as long as the parts of the fund are doing well as a whole, we are good.

SPY is hovering at $151, and historically it hasn't gone much past $160. We purchased it at $119, so it has been mildly profitable. It might be a good idea to set an automatic sell, say at $140, just to limit the amount that we can lose in the case of a crash. Using automatic orders is good for a small, informal group such as ours. We meet once a week, and none of us is at the computer all day looking at the numbers. Using these tools allow us to keep a watchful, robotic eye on our money.

EWZ is steady.
ENZL is humming along, as is ATT.

Now, on to the problem of figuring out where to put our money.

We took a look at a few different funds, and did some reading. A while back, we were thinking about investing in HILO, an emerging markets ETF. It is billed as a low-volatility, emerging market, dividend ETF. Also, we looked at EELV and EEMV. HILO is unfortunately a little more "expensive," because it has a high expense ratio. The fund is performing well, but it drags a little because it has to work that much harder to make up for the higher expense ratio.

Next week we should delve further into these funds, and maybe even make a decision on a buy.

Profit!