The visiting family wandered off last Sunday so I'm finally
catching up with the blogs I read. It's really amazing how much time I
can spend reading about other people’s lives.
You’d think I didn’t have one of my own; life that is. As it is I’m driving myself nuts trying to
figure out what to do with some of our mutual funds. I know I want to move more into index funds; it’s just that there
are so many to choose from!
I can see why some people prefer to have a professional
manage their money. It’s a lot like work. Fortunately I enjoy it. Yahoo Finance is my friend. Our brokers, Fidelity and TD Ameritrade,
each have research available as well so if Yahoo doesn’t have the information I
want there are other sources I can use.
One of the things I like to check is what companies are owned by the
fund. For example, we own Fidelity
Contrafund (FCNTX). One might think
that they would hold stocks that might be out of favor with the intent of
making lots on them when they recovered.
Well, you’d be wrong. They own Apple,
Google, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, Walt Disney – how much more mainstream can you
be? It gets really fun when you go into
the ‘Basic Tech. Analysis’ section and compare the last years price chart of
FCNTX vs SPY (an index fund for the S&P 500). That is when you find that FCNTX sometimes tracks the S&P 500
really closely and sometimes, like now, it falls behind. So now I’m paying extra for a managed fund
that isn’t doing as well as an index.
Grrrrr!
When I’m not grinding my teeth over stuff like that I
sometimes get out to work in our yard.
This is weed time in the desert so pulling the big ones and spraying the
little ones is my lot these days. At
least it is good exercise. It’s not
very satisfying because they seem to spread faster then you can get rid of
them. There are a couple of guys in our
yard that we like: two cacti that we
actually planted. I’ve started watering
them; you are supposed to let them be over the winter. Here is a photo of the results; new
growth. I’ll try to get more photos
after the growth becomes something more.
I guess that’s all the news that’s fit to print. Thanks for reading. Have a good one.
1 comment:
Good luck on the stock forecasting. And the weed pulling. Not sure which is more productive.
Post a Comment