Eileen's picks

First purchases

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In this competition -- and in real life -- I aim for long term, consistent and safe portfolio growth to meet the needs of 3 or more generations, and Bianca, who has an incredible talent for shopping, looks for great value for price paid, whether it's in school clothes or stocks. We're both grateful that the market has gone through days of correction before the start of this competition, but neither of us is confident that this is yet the time to buy.

So what did we decide to do? This noon, after watching how much volatility there was in the morning, we placed a small market order for one of Bianca's favorite companies, AMERICA MOVIL, S.A.B. AMX is a major provider of wireless services in Latin America, and they have recently purchased 100% of Telecable de Puerto Rico. Bianca's dad is Puerto Rican, and over the last 6 months since she got interested in this stock Bianca's taken advantage of every opportunity to quiz relatives in Puerto Rico and friends of both her mother and her father who live in Latin America (or call there a lot) about the company and its competitors. Because it has suffered less in the past week than everything else we're considering at this time, that's the one we decided to purchase outright to bring our portfolio into compliance with percentage invested.

Because of our discomfort with what the market will do over the summer and into September, we decided to do all the rest of our initial purchasing with limit orders. We usually use 50 and 200 day moving averages as guides to entry point selection, but -- because of the sudden steepness of this correction and doubts about how much lower it will go -- we decided to go back and also look at prices after the last market correction back in March. Then we picked entry points for each purchase that we felt would give us the best value for our money.

Asset, size and sector diversification is VERY important to us. We only invest to make money -- to use for college costs, home buying, starting families or businesses, that kind of thing -- so we don't get attached to anything. We look for the best in whatever category is low and buy it at what we think is a good price. And we want to have a life beyond research. ETFs with good track records and very low expenses give us diversification we can count on without the effort of researching every stock. So today we placed limit orders for the maximum dollar amount of ETFs (leaving room for anticipated growth) that the competition allows.

We also bought on limit orders more AMX and three other stocks we have both been following (or owning) for some time.

We are keeping as much in cash as the competition allows until we feel more confident that we've found the right stocks to fit each of our remaining niches in size, sector and asset type. When we buy, we buy to hold, so we buy carefully.

We'll tell you the details of our limit order purchases as the purchases occur.

Over the coming weeks we'll also tell you more about our diversification system and how we keep track of it.