Treat Yo Self

The word on the street is that the Fed is thinking about raising interest rates, since the jobs numbers have been better. That could mean things will be cooling down a bit. Eventually they will, of course, so then we can invest in candy and cosmetics to rot our teeth and look good for the party at Ground Zero. These investments tend to do well during a down economy. The idea is that you can treat yourself to these comforts, even when the world is falling apart around you.

Also, we're headed for another buy, so we need to consider our next move. It was noted that we have never bought any bonds, and there may be something to be learned from a non-equity buy. Also, we haven't done any commodities. If only we could figure out the McRib cycle. One problem with buying a commodity is that it would mess up our diversity, since our portfolio is so small.

We've always been concerned with diversifying our portfolio, and one of the original purposes of this group was education. Maybe we need to focus on the parts of this that we don't yet understand, rather than continue our march towards the perfectly diversified portfolio. Before our break we did spend some time looking at a single company. We ended up going with Proctor & Gamble (and we purchased AT&T in the past). WIth both PG and T, we purchased them as proxies for other things (sector, dividend). We didn't pick these up as growth engines, but rather for their stability. The next step may be developing skills for selecting something that we do expect to grow. Another idea is to focus on building a good retirement fund, with bonds and treasuries and the like. Either way, we should take some time looking into non-equity (stocks) investments.

ENZL and EWZ basically still cancel each other out.

SPY is still up significantly from where we picked it up, even though in the last few days it has dropped a bit. Every drop makes people think its the end.

VPU, NORW, and PG are basically being stable. Mission accomplished on those.

T is still up more than we expected.

Hey, we noticed this article linked on our sigfig account. It's pretty interesting:

P & G to shed more than half its brands

This adds to our knowledge from reading the annual report. From that, it looked like PG was trying to get more diverse internationally, and now they seem to be trying to get rid of stuff that isn't overwhelmingly profitable.

Profit!