mymeohmoneyblog

hi. i'm bored.
havent really known what to say the last 2 weeks.
Got jacked by 2 girls at the gay-bar after the iowa-syracuse game.
Can't stop thinkin' about them.
Didnt really have a good feel for the fed. have never even tried to predict the fed before.

Anyhows, i think i was kinda thinking that all things considered if i were fed-chairman i probably would'nt of (or at the least - would not have wanted to...) lower rates.
It was my own personal hope that they wouldn't lower rates. Sometimes i guess i don't mind seeing people suffer for there mistakes, though there is value in mercy - n'est ce pas?
So the current scenario would mean some short-term enthusiam, followed by reality, followed by some christmas love/joy/hope.
I thought it might have been better if we'd had some sort of a washout, not that i particularly care what the overall market does, since in my personal portfolio i try to focus on just a handful or less of companies. My SLO port is just floatin' along with modest growth, just like a normal mutual fund, with about 1-3% average gain/mo. Haven't been too inspired to change things, though i know i should.
No new trades here tonight. Now that this fed-watch is over think i'm no longer tempted to gamble on a move one way or the other, so i think it's about time i trim the portfolio down from about 20 to about 9 or 10 positions. For those of you who don't know by now, the ideal high-volatility/high-gain portfolio while remaining in compliance with SLO rules is 7 positions, while having 8 or 9 or 10 positions gives you a little bit more maneuver room. ('dustylove' seems to be doing quite well for a 'many position' portfolio - but perhaps he made his $ early - http://www.investorplaceblogs.com/users/dustylove/portfolio.php -this is not the norm ).

Also, as a perfectionist, i havent wanted to sell any for losses, hoping too much for a perfect sell record to benefit my marketocracy attributes/statistics. One of my cardinal rules of investing is to only buy stocks that will go up over time, no matter how long, so that i never have to take a loss (If I Dont Want To). That's the beauty of time and patience, knowing that eventually every pick you make will eventually be higher. I think the ultimate form of investing for me will ultimately turn out to be Leaps, if i can reach a point where i feel i have the remainder/liquidity to do so. So anyways i've pretty much decided to remind myself to put the SLO first and Marketocracy second, so i am going to be rebalancing at some point here, irregardless of price.

Back to inflation, lets not forget that a vast amount of all consumer discretionary income is ever-increasingly going towards filling up the tank and paying big-ticket monthly communications bills. These huge amounts of discretionary income vastly inflated from years ago and going out the window are not essentially being compounded to gross-domestic-inflation as the telcos and oil co's have essentially been holding onto everything they get and not reinvesting and/nor adding to the economy. So where comes the the discretionary income to pay for increased sales mo/mo, yr/r for regular consumer companies (the WMT's and MCD's of the world)? I think there has been somewhat of a minor paradigm shift from the stagflation picture of the 70's that everyone is so on guard about. If we were to say that in a more balanced (and manufacturing based) society of the 60's and 70's that 90% of houselhold spending went towards 'normal' puchases (durables, consumables, etc...) that that figure has proportionately dropped in today's more service and mobility based economy to say e.g. something like 50-70%. With much more consumer income now being spent on mobility (money for cable bills that allows us to sit on the couch - gettin' nowhere fast, money for the internet - to travel the world, money for telecommunications to call from anywhere to anywhere, and money for gastanks to drive anywhere) and with many of those repspective industries not reinvesting, essentialy gouging americans thanks to goverment granted exclusivity to national geology, radiospectrum, utility, etc... , the portion of consumer income, discretionary or otherwise, that one might of used to expect would contribute to inflationary models has proportionately gone down, or so it seems. Whereforth doth the $ come from to balance out the gouging?.... from modern liquidity, from aggregate corporate participation, from equity, etc... On a related point, i wouldnt be suprised to see many small-margin consumer discretionary stores trying to incrementally boost prices to increase sales, despite slowing demand; essentilly going against the grain of the traditional S/D curve we all learned about in econ 101, (or high-school econ-AP - in my case).
What does this mean?? i don't know. Just blogging. The big picture for me is to just continue to focus on individual stocks, and there are a great many that look cheap. I guess sometimes optimism reigns supreme.

Comments: View Comments |  Thursday September 20, 2007