I have been with Scottrade for almost six years. They are no frills, but they are cheap, charging only $7 for any kind of trade that I would make. Generally I don’t trade that much, keeping just a handful of stocks, maybe buying something when it seems like a good company is down. Then I follow my 20% rule where I sell when I make a 20% gain, or buy more of a stock when a stock I own goes down by 20%. In 2005 and in 2007 I made only one trade the entire year. I felt bad that Scottrade was making no money off of me, but one of their selling points is they don’t have fees for inactive trading. Other years were busier. In 2006 I made 4 trades, in 2004 9 trades, and 2003 was a big year with 11 trades. But 2008 was crazy. I made 45 trades as it seemed like there were a lot of good companies with low stock prices and I was able to buy and sell as stock prices went on roller coaster rides. Goldman Sachs was one of those: I bought it for $62 on Nov. 13, entered a limit order for my 20% gain price of $75.94 which it hit less than 2 weeks later. I then entered a buy order for the same old price of $62, which it hit Dec. 2. On Dec. 8 it triggered a sell for another 20% gain. That was 4 trades. Things haven’t been moving as much lately so maybe 2009 will be another slow year. I certainly won’t feel sorry for Scottrade after giving them $7 so many times in 2008.
Year: 2009
Pandas
This morning Susan and I got up early to see the new baby panda, Xi Lan (pronounced shee lahn, which means “Atlanta’s joy” where Lan is short for Atlanta). Born in August and briefly rejected by its mother, Lun Lun, Xi Lan was named on December 8 after 100 days, and only went on exhibit in the last week or so, and only for short times in the mornings. We got to the zoo shortly after it opened at 9:30 and got to the Panda area before 10:00 when they typically would let Lun Lun and Xi Lan into a glassed in area. We got to see the father Yang Yang who is kept in a separate area (though he can see Lun Lun and Xi Lan through the glass, but doesn’t seem to care; in the wild male pandas don’t take part in raising the cubs and rarely see their mates). Also the earlier panda baby, Mei Lan, is in her own area. At two years old, she looks fully grown and will probably leave the zoo this year. It was very cold (in the 30’s) but the pandas didn’t seem to mind. Xi Lan came out, but seemed to want to go back into the off-exhibit area except that Lun Lun would go and drag him back so that she could keep an eye on him while she ate the fresh bamboo in the public area. The zoo staff was pretty good about keeping people quiet and saying that if people made a lot of noise the pandas would go back inside.
Afterwards we went to see Susan’s favorite, the red panda. What I didn’t realize was this red panda is new, named Shandy. The previous red panda, Izzy, left in November to go to St. Louis to find a boyfriend.
One nickname for a red panda is firefox. They do look a lot like a fox. But in the logo below they went with an actual fox instead of a red panda:
Q4 Report
The website enterprise has been reeling lately. In May I moved copies of the money-making web pages back to Speedfactory, my dialup provider even though in January I switched to DSL. This gave me a bump in traffic and I also got page rank back, including at the new iGirder site. But in September, Speedfactory took the web page down and haven’t brought it back after months of me asking and them promising they would do it.
So anyway, traffic has come back a little, but it hasn’t been great. Around 100 visitors a day. In 2007 Sitemeter counted 137,000 visitors and in 2008 I got only 61,000. Extrapolate 100 visitors a day and I will be down to 36,500 in 2009. Amazon revenues have been way off too: $581 in sales in the 4th quarter, generating only $27.70 in commissions for me. In November I actually lost money, selling two small items, but getting a return on a more expensive item. Amazon will send a payment each month as long as you have more than $10 in earnings, so some months I don’t make that. In December someone placed an order of about 12 items, so it turned into a decent month with $15 in earnings (though by comparison the previous December saw $53 in earnings).
The best seller was the Turbo iPod charger with 3 sold, displacing the Maxell iPod battery pack, with 3 sales, but one return. The most expensive item sold was an $89 iPod to car stereo adapter. The most unusual thing sold was a pound of almonds.
AdSense has been off too, which is to be expected since I only have ads on the Sony and DeJumbler pages. So for the quarter I had revenues of $8 and it will be years before I see another $100 payment from Google. The nice thing is my advertising deal continues to pay $52 per month.
2009 Roth IRA
In January 2008 I put my Roth IRA contribution with Fidelity because they always have big taxable distributions on their funds and I thought it would be better to put any investments with them in an account that wouldn’t be taxed on those distributions. I still think that is a good idea, but my choices on where to put the money certainly didn’t work out. Last year I put money in a Small Cap Growth fund which proceeded to lose 42% of its value. The other part went to Fidelity Value Discovery which lost 37% of its value.