Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Getting Paid to Read (and ETF's)

A few comments on the portfolio: LB has rebounded about 16% over the last few days and hopefully this will continue. FRX has been steadily climbing up as well as UNTD (which is almost hitting $13). There's nothing special with EBF and it's right in line with the S&P. If I need to free up some cash, this is probably the first thing I'm selling. I also realized that I'm going to have to free up some time (I don't know how) to find more stocks to invest in since more money should be flowing in soon.

ETF's: I've ranked the ETF's from the list I posted earlier. The two on the top of the list are EEM (Diversified Emerging Markets) and IJS (S&P Small Value). The rest would be: IDU (U.S. Utilities), EWJ (Japan), and PGJ (China). Right now I'm leaning towards EEM since I have an exposure to small caps in my portfolio. It's currently in a downtrend so I might wait a little while to see if the price settles down a bit.
For this year I'm most likely going to split my contribution between EEM and SFL. I've owned SFL before and it leases tankers mainly to Frontline (it spun off from Frontline awhile back). I'm waiting to see how their second quarter went (it will be released tomorrow). If the results are stable and they comment on their dividend policy, then I'll add this to the Roth IRA. It is currently under $19 and it's yielding 9.50%.
A 50/50 split between the etf and SFl will result in an average yield of 5.27%. I'm also looking at capital appreciation from SFL as well.

Getting Paid to Read
At my work I have two main tasks: dealing with the trades in the morning and dealing with the trades after the market closes. Besides that, I work on smaller projects but the trading ones are my main tasks. The morning task usually takes a few hours while the afternoon one will take less than one hour. As you can see, I have a good amount of free time. Yesterday the head trader talked to me about technical analysis and gave me a book to read. I've read a few basic books and this one should strengthen my knowledge. So for the next few days I get to read while at work! I've been doing this for free on my own time, and now I get paid to do it- I was pretty happy about this (and also because it means they want to transition me to more of a trading position down the road, or even working with the analysts).


I also added a few blogs.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The only ETF that I own that's on your consideration list is ewj. I have owned this ETF for about a year and half and it's up by 18.51%. Hope this helps.

Anonymous said...

I've never actually bought any ETFs... Maybe it's time I give them a serious look. 18.51% is rather good.

On another note, did you end up researching thinkorswim better?