Last week we talked about doing a purchase of SPY. As you can see, it has been steadily going up, which gives us a little pause, because there's always the worry that we're buying it at or near a high, and it can only go down (see EWZ). Of course, that risk is always present, but the other side of that is we DON'T know, and it could go up. SPY has been a good, steady investment for us, nothing flashy but consistently growing. In the past we have decided to set our buys automatically at 1% below the current price, so we can get a little bit of a profit bump. This isn't foolproof, but it has worked for us for a while. Buying SPY at a 1% discount would cover our trading fee. The big thing here is to try not to be greedy. If you want your buy to go through, don't get greedy with it. Sounds a lot like buying a house.
After this buy, it would be interesting to try something smaller, say a small stock or a single company. Go through the research process, just like you used to do in school. It might be fun. We've been playing the stock market from a very macro sense, big funds representing sectors or countries, with an eye toward keeping everything in balance. Then there was AT&T, which we bought for dividends or PG, as a proxy for a sector (more on all those here). The point is, we're still trying to find ways to get some educational benefit. The nice thing is that we have enough invested that we aren't in danger of losing everything. The macro approach has been good for us, but it would be good to try out the more targeted approach, however impractical it seems. We have to keep in mind that this is really an educational experiment.
As a side note, in 2014 PG sold off a lot of their brands, and we could learn something from taking a look at the long term effects of this.
Profit.
No comments:
Post a Comment