"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."
--Sir Winston Churchill


Bloody week in the market. For a couple of days my trading screens were bleeding red off the monitor and onto the floor as the momo boyz (momentum traders) blew out of last quarter's red hot stocks, locked in profits, and gave those late to the game a chance to buy stocks low in the morning, lower in the afternoon and even lower the next day. Charts for Apple, Amgen, Genentech, Walgreen, Yahoo, and just about all the housing stocks as well as just about all of the oil and gas stocks looked like hammered horse exhaust. But there is always more than meets the eye. If you were where the action wasn't or in the luke warm stocks or where the story is now rather than then, it wasn't bad at all. Check out the charts for my 401a funds and the table for my account. It's not as good as two weeks ago but it's not bad and it's not even close to making a dent in what I made last year. Stocks go up, stocks go down, and the wiggles are noise. But out of the noise comes the trend. If the trend is up, I stay the course. And if the trend goes down, I cut my exposure. I'll wait and see. Paying attention is what cuts the risk and enhances the reward. I'm standing pat 'cuz I gotta have a trend change proven to me, especially when the trend has been working so well for me since 9/04.
Speaking of risk vs reward, I got asked by Kenny P if I was in the aggressive program for the 401. I couldn't even start to answer the question. It was a good question if you got your investing info from a typical investment advisor because it leans on a lot of basic assumptions they start you off with. But it has nothing to do with the world I live in. Check out my site's longest term chart for all the funds. Eyeball the bond funds. The bond funds are "conservative" in that you probably won't lose your principle. There is not much risk. Neither is there much reward. You'll only make the coupon, and if you're really lucky, a dollar or two on appreciation, if they sell the bonds for you at the right time. There's little reward and little risk. And it is totally defensible. But last year you lost the chance to make money if you were heavily in the bond funds. And anybody in the Balanced Pooled Fund was 50% bonds. Most amazingly, you even lost money in bonds when a lot of other investors were making money in stocks. I'm not sure that is conservative. Last year I just didn't see any reason why I should be in bonds and and especially in bond funds. The charts tell you I was right. Set up an opportunity for me to do a presentation to a small group and I'll explain why.
Stock funds are considered "aggressive" in that you can make or lose a lot of money. There's CAN be a lotta risk and a lotta reward. But if stocks are in a long term uptrend and you pick the right stocks or funds and keep one eye on the trend and one eye on the exit door, AND you are willing to book profits and step off the elevator near the top, either on the way up or on the way down, the risk goes down. If the reward is high and you lower the risk, I'm not sure that is "aggressive". It's not so much that everything you've been told is wrong, it's just that it's not quite as simple or as direct as you've been told. Or so I believe. Of course I could be wrong. Oh, yeah. I also believe that you get told what serves someone else's purpose and not necessarily your own. What does "Modern Portfolio Theory" and the Modern Jazz Quartet have in common? More than you'd think. See ya at the hall.

And it wads too may things into too little time. So it's Sunday evening and the charts and worksheets are current and I still gotta weekend o'stuff to do. But it don't look likely to happen....
Things of note; The run up at the beginning of the year has met with consolidation. I'm up quite remarkably in my trading account and IRA's and if I went 100% to cash after one month, I'd have a respectable year's worth of performance at the end of January. The pro's and hot money boyz think just that way and they are locking in gains and so their selling leads to weakness. I don't run my 401a that way so I'm standing pat. The charts tell the tale; the funds in the 401, less the WashMu, look good. We still may be in an uptrend and there still may be money to be made by being 100% in stocks. I shifted the overweight I had in some of the other funds to Calamos and put the month's contribution in there too. Other that that, it's still pedal to the metal and look through the windshield and not at the tach. See ya at the hall.

I trade stocks to make up what I see as a shortfall in my pension plans. And I spend way too much time and money reading about how, why, and what. There is something going on in the semi and telecom supplier and communications industry. I've made a dollar very recently and so has the Calamos Growth Fund that is in our 401a. I hold or have held half the stocks that they list as their top ten on their site and I like that. I'm going to redistribute some money tomorrow by placing an order w/ K&G tonight. Nothing big, just moving a little cash to someplace where I like the action. I'll post the result in a day or three. Stay tuned....

The charts tell the story. The last Friday's big crash lasted as headline material for one day, and the end of life as we know it probably will come to pass, but it didn't happen last week. I stood pat and at 100% invested in stocks in my 401. Last week, and actually all of January were very good indeed. 5.71% gain for the month gives me about half of what I'd call a very respectable year right out of the box. I've regained what last weeks big down Friday took and a little more. The 32% plus up in 17 months since I've been actively managing my 401 continues to give me a cushion of confidence and something to protect at the same time. Maybe I'll get more loquacious about all and sundry in the next post. On the docket is why I'm in only four of six stock funds, why I'm in no bond funds, why I do this website in the first place, what protecting gains means, etc. But that's it for now cuz I'm busier than a long tailed cat in a rocking chair factory. Ya know, if you talk to me and we can set up a face to face rundown for a small group of whatfor and howcome and onaccountawhy interaction it'd be much more to my liking. Writing takes time and effort and talking doesn't. See ya at the hall.

"If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen."
-- Joe DiMaggio

I'm still not up to speed on the Web tools; I'm doing my regular weekend financial rituals, then doing screen shots of spreadsheets and graphs, capturing them to files, excerpting cropped data to new temporary files, stripping out some stuff, cleaning them up with an image editting program, sizing and resizing them, uploading them, posting them into a Web site based editting and preview program, swearing a blue streak potent enough to make a 4th year boilermaker apprentice blush, dumping everything and starting all over. Not necessarily in that order. I shouldn't have to buy my own beer as long as I'm in the trade. But eventually it gets done. So the site is updated for this week. If you've been to a recent presentation, you oughta be 90% up to speed just by dragging your eyeball across the screen. If not, you're missing all the background. You know what to do about it.
So stick a fork in it, the toast has left the building, and the fat lady just clocked the bouncer with the drumset. This is where I stop for now. Except to say, I'm heavily invested in the best four out of six stock mutual funds available to Local members and I jumped on them the week that they became available to me. I was there for much of the recovery out of post dotcom crash/Iraq war (PDCIR) period and as of last week I was up 30%+ since the McMorgan Funds were replaced with something more to my liking. Every week I do the graphs to make sure the trend is up, I use FundAlarm.com to make sure the funds are exceeding their benchmarks and are above the 50th percentile on a long term basis, and I don't sweat the noise.
The radio and print is full of hysteria over the stock market blowup last week and the end of life as we know it. But only until the next headline comes along or the market goes up. What it means to me is that instead of being up 30% since 9/04, now I'm only up 28% over the last 16 months. I've got enough of a cushion to give me a sense of calm about Monday's stock market. I kinda figure it'll probably go down. Or not. Whatever. You gotta make the money while you can and I just had a great run. Now I gotta see if there is anything left to this post PDCIR recovery. They average around 36 months and this one started in Fall of 2002. Do the math. But then, each time somebody sez, "It's different this time." Mostly it isn't. But it is never ever exactly the same either. So I'm stayin' the course. There is a real possibility that all we are seeing is a change of leadership and not a crash. If that is true and our funds are in the right place, we're cool. But if my money starts to fade away any further, I'll take some or all of it off the table and maybe change casino's or park it with the desk while I get something to eat. I've tried the wallflower strategy and the deer in the headlight strategy and didn't care for them. So I've changed the program. I like this one better.
This here's one of those internet interactive blog thingies. If ya got a comment or question ya can post it and then wait and see if I've got the time and inclination to answer it. Pretty neat, huh? See ya at the hall.

Much of my website is given over to my 401a. No, not a 401k, a 401a. It is a multiemployer union participant run retirement plan rather than a company run plan. So if you belong to my union, you can watch me run my 401 with an open hand; cards face up on the table, posted once a week, unless something noteworthy occurs. So you can see what I do and follow along and maybe learn something. There are some very good reasons for doing this this way and if we do a face to face, you'll find out how and why. If you just happened across this blog or my website, your benefit, interest, or entertainment derived from it will be pretty low level. Oh well. If you have no direct relationship with this material and you still gotta see what happens, go for it. I'm happy to provide something positive in your life. Or not.

A coupla three weeks ago I decided to finally pull the trigger on my own website/blog. I ran my audio manufacturing business starting back in '83 with one of the earliest IBM PC"S, a PCII. It had an upgraded motherboard that would accept 256K memory rather than 64K like the old ones and came with two half height two sided double density 360K 5-1/4" floppy drives so I could ultimately go to four 5-1/4" floppy drives or maybe something else in the space, Lord knows what. I ended up using Lotus 123 to write my own business management software and automated my accounting/inventory control/invoice printing etc. But I closed the business in '89 and that was a lifetime ago. This new internet stuff was something I used as a participant in list serves and as a website surfer, so once again I'm entering new territory. I talked it over with my son and he told me,"Think of it this way. You're where every 12 year old kid was in 1998." I can accept that. Be patient, hang on, and let's see what comes down. To get back to where ya probably came from, click joefacer.com under "Links" to the right. See ya at the hall.