Old MacDonald has a server farm

We've been doing this for nearly ten years, very lazily on and off. Huh.

ICLN is the etf that we decided that we were going to buy. So do we? It is up 13% since a year ago and meets our criteria. Honestly, it takes us so long to buy that it's weirdly anticlimactic realizing that we've made a decision. Of all the ETFs and stocks in the world why this one? We're in this for the long term and we feel a sustainable energy ETF is a good choice. This one meets our criteria within that.

Buy buy buy!

INFY, our last buy, is up. Good job. Almost 20%! Our original intent was to buy this on a perceived drop and then dump it for cash. That means that is probably time to sell. That also means that there's some potential tax implications We may have to pay capital gains tax on this. Since we've had it less than a year, it just adds to the adjusted gross income of the account holder. We're a small time operation, so that will just impact one of our members (not all that much). The tax laws for long term capital gains tax are changing so that folks at the lower income tax brackets won't have to pay any long term capital gains.

Here's some more info about the changes to the tax code. Bascially, if adding it into your income keeps in the lowest two brackets, you do not pay any taxes on those capital gains. However, if it pushes you up into a 25% or 35% tax bracket you pay capital gains tax and it goes up from there.

For us, selling doesn't impact us that much. We're going to end up paying around 15%. We could reinvest to avoid that, but we move so slowly that it's not gonna happen.

Profit!

Waiting.

Brexit? Apparently the Brits don't know much about it either. As far us as though, we'll have to wait and see. We're not so Euro-centric in our portfolio, so it probably won't have too much of an impact on our buying.

Infosys is in executive free fall. The founder and the board have been fighting over how the company has been run, but it doesn't seem to be tanking the stock price so who knows? We still have not triggered our auto sell, order (which had to be re-upped).

And EWZ, you are always on our minds:

You want out now?  No... Ok...

This chart shows EWZ's continued descent into the toilet or right where it was in 2009. Unfortunately we bought it when it was in the 70s.

Here you can see the up and down a little more zoomed-in. There is still movement on it, but it is beyond us as to what that might mean. Basically, there's a lot of theory that drives how people analyze movement on stuff. These tools are "more for short term trading looking for hyper volatile instruments," says a friend of ours who knows about these things. There a bit of risk, because it "comes down to timing as opposed to valuation fundamentals" he goes on to say.


More for short term trading looking for hyper volatile instruments. I'm not a big fan because it comes down to timing as opposed to valuation fundamentals

As far as a buy, if we like the idea of SPY, there are a few dividend options for something related. We like stability, and we like dividends. We like stable dividends.

Profit!

I'm the operator of my pocket calculator, OR computers and trading.

"Is that the confirmation page, Bill?"
"I'm not sure."

We purchased some INFY a while back, with an automatic sell order if things moved to low or too high. We were checking in on it, and couldn't find any record of the open order to sell at a certain threshold. This brings up an interesting point about these nifty online investment tools--there can be a learning curve, and sometimes things are not set up in a way that is intuitive. What probably happened is that we didn't confirm the open order, because computers don't make mistakes...only the people operating them. Alternately, there could be something up with Scottrade, but that is unlikely. The lesson to learn here is double check your work, and be prepared to have funky things happen when you don't know how to use the system.

What we figured out is that when you put an advanced order in, such as the open order to sell at a low/high point, there is a confirmation screen. However, there seems to be an issue because this is being done outside of normal trading hours. This gives us a second confirmation screen (???). We're not really sure, but it seems like a bad system. The issue is the second review order screen looks basically identical from the previous one.

Probably we just didn't properly confirm everything.

Profit!