Dividend Bonus! Maybe we can put in that pool we always wanted.

The group discussed how we had a little love for Microsoft  which has become a bit of an underdog, compared to Google.  They may not quite be out of the tablet business and Bing is kind enough to point towards our member's science blog (Citizenship In Science).  Take a look.

(T) - ATT is down almost to the price where we bought it.  SigFig linked to a few interesting articles, one of which stated that T-Mobile is seeing a large increase in subscribers.  Another article talked about a price war in the US mobile market which may impact profits for all carriers.  Again, we realize that we purchased this for the dividends.

Where are our dividends anyways?  After a little bit of research, apparently they came back as cash.  We had wondered this for a while, but finally took the time to research.  Our portfolio is up a bit more than we previously thought.  We're up 14% rather than the 8% we thought we were based on equity purchases.  That's wonderful!

Extra Profit!

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!

Yousef forgets to write the minutes [insert joke here]

We started talking about retirement, and some among us are less inclined to crunch the numbers for fear of realizing they will be absolutely destitute, so we crunched some numbers. Here's the take-away:

A pension plan is a stable option, if you can secure one. However, it hinges on the idea of not leaving that job before retirement. If you do go with a pension plan, you need to take the few minutes to look at the calculations of your benefit. It is not as painful as you think...promise. Also to consider, is what happens should you leave and take on another job.

Stocks:

SPY is still doing well, still above the [rising] DMA.
ATT is doing okay, even if a little down--still getting dividends.
ENZL is still going up.
EWZ is still doing it's crap self.

What to buy next?

Profit!

Starbox!

Members present: Brian, Yousef

We talked a little about diversifying out of the US a bit. Our last two buys were done to diversify internationally. But where to from there? Europe doesn't seem stable, South America screwed us already, Africa is super-scary, and China isn't going to grow like it has. That doesn't leave a whole lot of places left. Penguin ETF?

Brian had a interesting conversation with a friend of his who dabbles in the markets. His friend posed the question: "Why invest in something stable?" His point is that if an investment doesn't really gain in value, we are paying trading costs just to have something that is the equivalent of cash. If it doesn't have any yield or any increase in value, the investor isn't getting anything out of it, except perhaps the goodwill of the people collecting his trading and management fees.

They also talked about how good dividends are. So we have some ATT, which is stable but we are getting something out of it with the dividend.

We were also looking looking at Coinstar (CSTNR), which includes Red Box. Apparently there were talks to work with Starbucks on a sort of StarBox coffee vending machine. That might work, but there are also talks of CSTNR going private as well. We'll look at it, but we definitely need something a little more tempting.

It might be a good exercise to make our next buy something that we purchase for a short-term investment. Perhaps we could set a threshold and maybe an automatic buy and sell point. This would work to our advantage because the three of us don't really move fast as a group.

Profit!

We make the 0.000000000027% difference!

Members present: Brian, Bickford, Yousef

 First, the charts:

SPY: Trucking along in the right direction. The 200 DMA is starting to swing up too!

EWZ: Brian feels the need to apologize yet again for EWZ being so crap.
However, how could he have known.
Brazil, babe, what are you doing?

AT&T: Steady as she goes--doing exactly what we want her to do. 

Next, we did a proxy vote for our few shares of AT&T:

Most of the voting centered around the election of members to the board, and frankly we abstained. However, there were a few items of interest.

AT&T recommends that we vote against a "Political Contributions Report" as well as "Limit Wireless Network Management." However, as a consumer, corporations reporting their political contributions sounds pretty rad. Also, I don't like the idea that my internet would be throttled. The point here is that the interests of an investor might be different than the interests of a consumer. AT&T not reporting their political contributions and doing whatever they please with their wireless network are probably good for the money bits, however there is that whole right vs. wrong thing that gets in the way.

While this is not really a terribly impactful vote (we own 19 shares out of 6 billion), it does bring up the possibility that one can invest while still preserving his conscience. And hey, we did vote, so there's some difference, however small.

Profit!