Let it go

Recently a few items in our portfolio have taken a bit of a dip, but that is to be expected given all the uncertainty in the air. However, we've done approximately thirteen buys since the beginning, and if you look at our cumulative investment, we have still made a profit. It should be noted that this is largely due to SPY, the S&P ETF.

This train of thought led us to talk about historical returns of the US stock market in general over time. A lot of folks have said that you should essentially throw all the money into the S&P and just let it go. We can see why some people recommend that, because historically it gains in the neighborhood of 7% a year (adjusted for inflation), which generally outperforms most portfolios. Basically, you can put everything into an index fun and do okay. Unless, of course, the market crashes. Isn't this fun?

We participated in this, because, again, most of the gains in our portfolio have come from SPY being such a large part it.  SPY has far outweighed some big losses--we're looking at you EWZ. One of our team made a comment that small cap funds have done twice as well. Then we took a few minutes to research and we found SLY, the SPIDR for small caps. It could be a little brother to SPY, our current big holding. Morningstar has good things to say about. It provides about half of the dividend yield as SPY at 1%.

Basically, this just refers to the size of the company:

• Large cap is anything over $10 billion
• Mid Cap is $2-10 billion
• Small cap is anything under $2 billion
• Then there's micro, nano, and mega cap. It gets crazy. 

Mom and pop shops aren't a part of this, for example Take-Two Interactive, which makes Grand Theft Auto. You know, the old lemonade stand. 

So if we like the idea of investing in the US, but we're looking to find something just a little bit riskier, maybe we give this a shot. 

Hey remember that stock we bought a few weeks ago? We'll we are down $10 (total), so we should keep an eye on it. 

Profit