Ted's Blog

I’ve been buying stocks lately and sticking to my 20% rules. This worked great for Suntrust which has been oscillating up and down, but my other picks have only been going down, so I keep buying more. I bought Google earlier in the year, then again when it dropped 20%, then sold when it went up, then bought some more when it went back down. Then this month it went down even more, so I bought some more at $319 per share. My target sale price was $389 and change, so I dutifully entered a sell order at that price. When the stock market skyrocketed Monday, Google went up to the low 380’s, but not high enough for my order to execute. The next morning before the markets opened, I saw that pre-market trading had Google at $391. Even though a limit order will sell for at least the limit and more if the market supports it, I thought this would be a good chance to up my limit order. I noticed that European stocks were up by about 6% already, so if Google went up 6% from the previous day’s close, it would hit $402. I didn’t want to mess with the $400 barrier, so I changed my sell order to $397 which, on my 3 shares, would only have given me another $24. But sometimes you get big bumps at the start of the trading day, so I hoped for the best.

Continue reading “A Little Too Greedy”

A guy I know bought a townhouse several years ago near me. He is very responsible and has never missed a payment, but he is on the verge of walking away from his house and mortgage. Like most townhouses, the neighborhood association charges dues, and maybe unlike a lot of townhouses, those dues pay the water bill since the units are not individually metered and can’t be retrofitted due to the water supply lines being shared among units.

The homeowner’s association went through some bad leaders, at least one of whom was stealing money or hiring family to do work at exorbitant prices. At some point, some people stopped paying their dues. Then they had a water leak which was at first identified as a natural spring until someone noticed their water bill was completely out of hand. This is when the trouble starts. The association was low on funds already from the theft, mismangement, and dilinquent dues and didn’t have the money to pay this huge water bill due to the leak. Over time the water bill got larger and larger and fewer and fewer people were paying their dues. They put liens on people’s units for not paying dues, but these were ignored and the liens expired. In order to evict people, lawyers would have to be hired, requiring more money that they didn’t have. Instead they paid what they could to the water company who at this point was threatening to shut off their water if they didn’t make good on the bill. People started to leave the complex or were foreclosed. Today only 20% of the units are occupied and there are only a handful of people still paying their dues. The water will be shut off soon and there will be no way to get it turned back on short of coming up with tens of thousands of dollars to pay the water bill. So after paying on the place for years, he’s just going to leave and rent an apartment. He knows his credit history will be trashed for walking out on his mortgage, but he can’t live there and he can’t sell the unit either. Even if he could pay off the water bill for the whole complex, they would soon be in debt again due to people using water and not paying dues. Soon all of these different mortgage companies will own all of these different units (or the water company will) and be stuck with nearly worthless property with no water service.

This guy loses all of the equity he had in his home. The mortgage company loses the money they lent out. And the water company still won’t be paid. Everyone loses.

As the stock market has spiraled downwards the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to buy shares while they were on sale. This worked pretty well with Suntrust during its ups and downs. I had cash sitting in a number of different places: the credit union, PayPal, ING, and a money market fund with Vanguard. I had bought some Google after it dropped way off in February, bought some more in March after it dropped 20%, then sold some after it went back up. In September it was back down and I bought some more. Then Dell and Intel released bad forecasts and dropped a lot, so I bought some of that. As the rest of the market went south, those stayed around the same level until this week when they were both down 20% again, so I bought some more Google and some more Intel. Meanwhile, this week Suntrust was back down again, so I got some of that earlier in the week. Last week I put some money in Vanguard Index 500 and used last week’s Suntrust proceeds to get some Apple, seemingly cheap at $98, but could have had it for $89 this week easily enough. Foreign markets were really hammered lately, so I bought some more Janus Overseas this week, then with the last of the cash I was willing to put at risk, I bought a little more today. Now I’m on the sidelines and the market is on its own. I’m tapped out.

I still have money that isn’t in the stock market, like my Washington Mutual CD, my Series I Savings Bonds generating 5% and 6% returns, and a reserve in my ING account drawing 2.75%. The website Savings Bond Advisor has a chart comparing investing one dollar a month in the Vanguard 500 index fund or one dollar a month in Series I Savings Bonds since those inflation-indexed bonds were introduced in 1998. They also show the total amount invested and the Index 500 is about to go below the accumulated principle. This means that putting your money under your mattress would outperform the S&P 500 over the last 10 years. Accordingly, my deferred compensation account went below the level of the principle just today after 16 years of monthly contributions going to stock mutual funds (not quite true, see graph in comment below). Oh well. The good thing is that with my Roth IRA I can’t take out any earnings without a penalty, but right now I can take out all of it if I want. In fact, it could go up about 40% and I could still take it all out.

I think the market has to be oversold, but it could also drop further. And the recession in general seems to have a while to go before it is over, many are saying a year or more. The total I’ve put back in the market this year roughly equals my losses on what I already had invested, so I think that’s probably a decent strategy from an active timing approach. Today the market seemed to find a bottom and recover a little bit, so maybe things will start going back up. That Goldman Sachs stock looks like a really good buy though . . .