Friday, April 15, 2005

Net Worth Update

Wow what a day. I saw lots and lots of red (although my friend owns DNA, so she was happy today). Most of my stocks went down and NTE completely kicked my ass. It was down past 10% for the day, and ended the day down around 8%. No news was released so everyone is saying that all the tech stocks are tanking since some of the big ones (IBM, AAPL, SUNW) have had some disappointing news.
What to do?
I've thought about a few things: 1) sell everything and sit in cash, 2) sell a few positions and then short some stocks, 3) do some sort of option strategy to bring in some income, or 4) wait for the market to relax a bit and then buy aggressively. This reminds me of something the president of the company I work for told me. He's about 75 and worth around 15 million or so, but when he was younger and investing he went through a few year stretch where he just made some wrong decisions and lost a good amount of money. He thought about what happened, and knew that he could beat the market- so he did a very aggressive thing, he starting buying with his cash and when that ran out he bought on margin and creamed the averages the next three years.
Tempting, but risky...

Net Worth as of today
Wamu: $728
Cash: $11
ING: $4,951
IRA: $58
Scottrade: $16,468
Total: $22,216
I've dropped almost one grand from my portfolio and have entered the negative territory.

The max total from monies that I should receive shortly (transfers from paypal, some other payments, etc). $23,581

My goal by the end of May is in jeopardy. Along with the max total and my future paychecks, the amount is roughly $24,109
which is about $900 short from my goal.
Through my college career this is my third updated goal. My first goal was $15,000 but I hit that fairly early so I raised the goal to $20,000. Then I decided to go for $25,000.
I think this was within reach since I would have got there if the market has not been tanking these past few days.

Next, I need to think about my future monetary goals. My end goal would be $4 million by the age of 50. I figured that, by this time, if all of the money is in fixed income it would be able to generate at least $200,000/year.
In my next post I will try to detail out goals for ages: 30, 40, and 50.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey, here’s another reason why the market has been selling off so much this week. A lot of people were selling equities in their account to raise enough cash to pay their tax bill to the IRS. Think about it, many people who know that they owe the IRS usually postpone mailing in their checks until the last minute (e.g. April 15). Hence, they quickly sell off investments in their portfolios to raise cash and transfer that cash into their main accounts to cover their IRS payment.