Eileen's picks

More purchases

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As with Brookfield Management, I bought Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (RIO) at a price way above my planned entry point at the beginning of the competition, only to watch it plummet and then to see it recover. If only I'd waited! This company, together with its subsidiaries, operates as a diversified metals and mining company worldwide, and fills my niche for industrial materials, as well as classifying in the foreign equities category and overlapping into commodities, as does Brookfield Management. RIO has the endorsement of a number of different analysts I follow as well as passing several screens I use with flying colors. Bianca likes it because its acronym is close to her last name. "Investing is like betting in a lot of ways" she says, so it's OK to bet on a stock for personal reasons as long as there are enough other reasons too.

Some of our price triggers were hit with Friday and Monday plunges, and we acquired a lot more of Bianca's personally researched pick, AMX. It's now our top performer, up 6.53%.

If you've read our previous posts, you'll know that Bianca and I like to do lots of things besides stock research, so we rely on exchange-traded funds to give us broad-based diversification in areas we don't want to research. If we could within the rules of the competition, we'd have 80% of our money invested in low cost high performance ETFs.

We recently got three of our ETF picks at prices lower than the limits we set: JKJ which seeks investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance of the Morningstar Small Core Index; PYH, a Value Line Industry Rotation Portfolio ETF bought to provide a weighted balance of industry sector representation; and DBC, a commodities index fund. Although it's not showing up in the portfolio, we also seem to have acquired some of the shares of DBV we wanted. I'll explain that purchase when/if it shows up.

Here's how we're doing in relation to our plan: we have 59% of our funds in equities and we intend to have 77%. We plan to have 60% in growth, 25% in value and 15% in blend or core holdings. Currently we're at 25%, 69% and 6%.

In the most important part of the plan, asset diversification, we plan 40% in US equities and have 16%, plan 30% in foreign and have 26%, plan and have 6% in real estate, plan 9% in commodities and have 1%, and plan 15% in "safe stuff" and have 51%.

The allocation of what we've bought: 63% large cap, 24% mid cap and 13% small cap is in line with what we plan to have.

Over the next few days, I'll decide whether I think the rally of yesterday and today is going to last or whether it's simply providing an opportunity for more selling as I suspect.