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!

Dividend Aristocrats

A family walks into a talent agency...

One of our members came across this article from Lifehacker about different conservative investment strategies, including an interesting class of stocks, known as Dividend Aristocrats. These are stocks that have a great track record of increasing dividends. ATT, which we purchased for the sole purpose of its dividends, fits into this category. We are always looking for a potential buy, and this may be a good avenue for us to pursue. As a side note, it would be nice to find a Dividend Aristocrat that also would balance out our Healthcare or Consumer Discretionary sectors, as we are always looking to keep a nice balance. 

One of those dividend stocks we have our eye on, FTR, is something we looked at back in in September of 2013. We didn't end up buying it, because we felt it would have been redundant in our portfolio. That ended up being a missed opportunity. It might benefit us to more arrive at decisions a little more quickly. We've tended to deliberate ourselves out of a buy on more than a few occasions. At that point in time, not buying FTR fit into our investment strategy, and now it is up in an up world, and hindsight being what it is, etc. 

On another note, one of our members received a framed share of Apple stock as a wedding gift several years ago. Although this is THE actual document, it would be a good idea to look into an electronic record of this, in case something happened. It may be the case that the share has to be mailed in for verification. Also, since Apple pays dividends, these could be set to be reinvested in more shares (or portions of shares), which although small, are still something. 

Profit!

Back in the Saddle

Screen capture of our dividend yield for the last few quarters.

Our dividends are deposited as cash into our account.  We haven't done the best job of tracking our dividends, so we thought we'd take a little time to do that.  The graphic to the left is from SigFig and shows us our total dividends for the past year along with the projected dividend for the next quarter.  Hovering over each on the site allows us to see the breakdown of which funds/stocks have paid us.  Each holding has a yield for the year, so we're going to take a look at the totals year-to-date.

Symbol	Total YTD	Yield (expected 2014)	Yield YTD
ENZL	15.34	4.90%	2.47%
EWZ	5.78	4.20%	2.07%
NORW	12.11	2.40%	2.38%
PG	7.72	3.00%	1.52%
SPY	10.97	1.90%	1.39%
T	22.08	5.20%	3.91%
VPU	13.6	3.50%	2.50%

We'll have to wait to see if quarter 4 brings us to where we expected to be.  Sigfig expects that 5 of 7 funds will pay dividends in the 4th quarter.  NORW and ENZL are done for the year.  NORW is pretty dead on where it is supposed to be, but ENZL is about half of where it should be.  We'll have to look into why that is the case.  Next week we should examine this all a little more thoroughly.

We are going to take at look at this crazy-bananas site next week as well. It has all sorts of financial visualizations.

Profit!

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!

Things are rough all over, Ponyboy.

Members present: Brian, Bickford, Danak

Everything we have in our portfolio is down, but then again markets in general are down. That's good, right?

We read another article from JP Morgan Chase, and while interesting, it didn't seem particularly useful for us. We will have to continue skimming through these for relevant bits of analysis.

Finally, we took  a look at some more of the Asian funds, comparing MAPIX and AAXJ to theircategory as a whole (Diversified Pacific/Asia, according to Morningstar). Morningstar only provided information on total return. We want something that does well in general, but maybe hasn't done so hot recently. The idea is to catch it on the upswing, which may be risky, or yield-y. Both funds seem pretty good, but we need to take a closer look at some of the cons of each of these funds, in order to see what may be better in the same category. This would directly address our concerns with investing in something. As usual, further study is required.

For next week, we will take a closer look and identify our concerns with MAPIZ and AAXJ. Then we will try to find some other funds in the category that address those concerns.

Profit!

Shut yo mouth!

Members present (and agape!): Brian, Bickford, Danak

We looked at our SigFig account, and were trying to find out exactly where the dividends are going. We didn't have any luck.

Also, EWZ--should we dump this thing? It has been so bad to us.

We still have our eyes on some sort of African ETF, in particular NAFAX, but that doesn't look so good. Then there was another fund, WAFMX. However, we stopped taking a look at it, since the minimum investment is $2000--a little big for us.

The search continues.


For next week:

Look for potential investments in Africa &Asia

Profit!

Dividont's!

Members present: Brian, Bickford, Yousef

The Dow just changed. Kraft is out, and some medical company is in. The managers in charge of the Dow Industrial Average must think that this change will best represent the market as a whole, but we're not really certain.

Europe is still trying to sort things out, but the market seems mollified for the moment.

One of our members has a goofy onestock.com share of Apple in a nifty frame--it was a wedding present, and he has been ignoring the thing's actual value for some time. However, he's not collecting dividends on the thing. He needs to look into that, and figure out what his most highly-valued piece of art can do for him. This also means that he has taxable income from those dividends, which in turn means that he will need to report those dividends.

Our portfolio is moving up.

ENZL has moved up about $3.50 since we purchased!
SPY is at an all-time high for up (purchased at $119), currently at $147

There are two ways we can play the exit strategy for SPY:
1. Buy and hold until the KOL finance portfolio is done...when we retire forever from video boxing.
2. Or we could sell constantly (this makes tax stuff a little more complicated, however we need to consider dividends anyway).

EWZ...ugh. Diversity appears to have bitten us there.

However, here's the breakdown of our meager portfolio. You will notice a 7% gain in the value, which should take into account dividends being rolled back into more shares (or portions of shares).

The positions listed below represent your holdings as of the previous market’s close. Market values are delayed by at least 15 minutes.

		Symbol/ CUSIP	Security Description	Quantity	Acquired Date	Holding Period	Average Unit Cost	Cost	Market Price	Market Value	Unrealized Gain/Loss	% Gain/Loss	Covered
		ENZL	ISHARES TR ZEALAND INVST ZE	16.0000	08/09/2012	Short Term (329)	$31.1375	$498.20	$33.4620	$535.39	$37.19	7.47%	Covered
		EWZ	ISHARES INC BRAZIL INDEX FD	6.0000	05/27/2011	Long Term	$75.1467	$450.88	$57.0600	$342.36	-$108.52	-24.07%	Non-Covered
		SPY	SPDR TR UNIT SER 1	4.0000	11/15/2010	Long Term	$122.3200	$489.28	$147.2400	$588.96	$99.68	20.37%	Non-Covered
		T	AT&T INC	16.0000	12/27/2011	Short Term (103)	$30.3175	$485.08	$37.2600	$596.16	$111.08	22.90%	Covered
	** Total All Asset Classes							$1,923.44		$2,062.87	$139.43	7.25%

It's nice to see some positive movement in the portfolio, even if it is just inflationary.

If we would have invested all of our lot in SPY, we would have been up 20%. However, if we would have gone all-in with EWZ, we would have been down 24%. Diversifying may take away those dizzying highs, but it also mitigates the doldrums.

Profit!

Exit, Stage Left.

Exit strategy.

There has been a decent amount of talk lately that the stock market is getting ready to hit an all-time high and that the fundamentals of the US are still not good.  One of the group's friends thinks that the market will crash sometime soon.  The largest DOW number was right around 14,000 in October of 2007.  Today the Dow is  13,306, so we are floating around there.

We were again talking about an idea of not buying things that are too stable with no bonuses.  We didn't realize that ENZL actually drops a pretty nice dividend.  That's a lucky break.  If you would have held it this entire year, you would have received a

Dividends can potentially be a red flag.  If a company is increasing their dividend, there must be some reason.  The company may desperately need cash, not a positive.  It'll work to pull people in.  The company could end up being on the hook to pay a large amount of money.  Doing a one-time large dividend to attract and then don't follow up, people could all run away again.

We bought T for the dividend.  There should be a new one next month.  We've been getting a good increase in stock value out of the company.  Since they are quite regular, people will leave if they skip a dividend and the value will plummet.

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!

The gang buys the Mordor ETF!

Members present: Brian, Bickford, Danak

One of our members recently got hired for a new position, and he was able to have a conversation with his new employer about his internet footprint. Interestingly, his new employer is friends with one of his former colleagues on Facebook, and so she was able to take a look at multiple layers of his presence online. The good news is that he apparently had been a responsible and not-too troubling netizen. However, the real story, if any, in this is that even the precautions of locking things up tight may expose some cracks, say from unintended and unknown relationships. It seems best to use the Babysitter's club axiom of not writing anything down that you wouldn't want copies posted around school of.

Apparently, in late June we earned a 2% dividend on EWZ, so that means we have 2% more of disappointment.

SPY and T are on their way up. EWZ is floating.

It is decision time, and here's our shortlist: ENZL, NORW, and HILO

Comparing ENZL and NORW with respect to percentage changes (see below) shows that ENZL seems a little less volatile. The comparison to HILO (not pictured) shows ENZL to be the least volatile.


So we decided to go with ENZL, partially because it seems like a good buy and partially because we just needed to make some sort of decision. It doesn't feel like a hasty one, but we have had a tendency to sit on money and just let it pile up.

But wait!

As we were about to buy ENZL, we noticed that there was a difference in price between the bid and asking prices. These are the prices that you get and will pay, respectively. The discrepancy between these two is called the spread. A large spread can be the result of a low trading volume for the product or for a product that is not actively being traded.

*More information here.

So the question became, is this worth it? In other words, are we going to be able to make up the spread in the long run? We thought we would, so we went with it. Another fun thing with trading during nights and weekends is that the market is closed, so technically when we click buy, nothing has officially been bought until it goes through when the market is open. There are several buying options, including market and limit.

Market: you agree to purchase the stock/fund at whatever the market price is
Limit: you set the limit for what you will buy or sell at

You can also set the window in which the trade can take place.

This opens up some interesting options for automating your transactions to a certain extent. You can go as deep as you want to with these, however make sure that you don't set up something disastrous or you could end up defaulting or getting your trades restricted. Trade safe, America!

So I guess that means we have a piece of New Zealand, but the real question is, why isn't the symbol LOTR?

Profit!