We're thinking about hiring the Paul the Octopus to manage our portfolio.

We talked about this Wired article that took a look at how random methods of stock picking can do about as well as actively managing a portfolio without all that nasty volatility. While the article isn't heavy on details and is more amusing than anything, it is interesting to talk about volatility, especially in light of the recent Nasdaq market glitch.

Also, there was this article from the folks at Planet Money that made an analogy between choosing what you think is best and what you think others will think is best in terms of baby animals. They likened this to how people behave with regard investing, where sometimes investments are chosen not on their merits as you see them, but upon what how you think your peers will value them. Perhaps we needs to see some sort of New Sincerity movement sweep the investment world.

In other news, our portfolio has changed around a bit. We started out buying chunks of five stocks, with each one worth 20% of our portfolio. However, with how things have changed in valued over time, our domestic stocks are now worth 60% of our portfolio. Interestingly, given how Brazil went to the toilet, EWZ is only about 6% of our portfolio value. By shares 60% of our portfolio is foreign, however by value only about 40% of our portfolio's worth lies outside the US.

The US economy has done well, which has served to skew the percentage of our portfolio value toward America. This is where having a diversified portfolio has, with the way things shook out, ended up limiting profits. Even our Beta is shifting downward. However, if we had chosen a more foreign portfolio, we would be in some dire straits indeed. While it is a little disappointing that we didn't predict the future, this is something we anticipated in our strategy. We were hoping when we started this experiment we would at least break even, and so far that appears to be the case. We are doing better than a savings account, and hopefully as we increase the size of our portfolio, the small rate of return will be more financially significant. Of course, we aren't even talking about how dividends may have contributed to this.

As far as a next investment, what about Egypt?

A random investment algorithm wouldn't see anything here, but humans say, "Hey, look what those colored lines are doing...I bet I can make some money..."

And then, we were talking about Africa as a place to put some money. After doing some discussion, we narrowed it down to:

EZA
GAF
AFK

And then there were some Asian investments. If only there was an Antarctica ETF.

For next week, we need to seriously consider what the long-awaited next buy. We should take a look at our friend's portfolio and analyze it the way we did with the Africa investments. Hopefully, a good pick will shake out.

Profit!