Tactical Allocations

My lawn is a mess.  You might wonder what that has to do with investing, the answer is nothing, but this weekend I went online to find out how to improve my lawn and found "the Lawn Care Nut" on U-Tube. As I watched his podcasts I realized how something he knew so much about could be very confusing to a beginner.  So I am revisiting the basics today. The Three Keys:   I am going to focus on the three most basic things needed to begin investing. They are Material, Time, & Patience. Material:   Every craftsperson has material they work with or a medium.  The material for investing is cash. Without cash you cannot invest. I define investing as: using your cash to earn more cash.  You can think of each dollar as a little worker that works for you 24/7. Without material (or workers) you cannot build anything. So the first thing you need to do to become an investor is put some cash aside.  This is easiest through a retirement plan, especially if you can have it ta

I am changing the way I present the review of the three strategies. Each section will be titled with a question and under that question will be the data, tables, or commentary that answers the question. At the end I will give the answer I take away from the data presented. I hope this makes it easier for readers to see and understand the data presented. I would love to hear your comments or let me know if there are other questions you would like me to try to answer. QUESTION: How did the portfolios perform? Cumulative returns of each of the strategies as though you had invested $100,000 in them at the beginning of the blog. ANSWER:     All returns are positive so that is good. The TA strategy is doing everything I would hope it would do. The enhanced strategy continues to struggle and I am revisiting the way that I "enhance" that portfolio going forward.  QUESTION:  What happened in the market that impacted returns? Equal Portfolio:   This por

Equal Weight Portfolio: Cash balance on September 4th = $362.11 No trades TA Portfolio: Cash balance on September 4th = $573.46 No trades Enhanced TA Portfolio: Cash balance on September 4th = $291.95 Sold 218 shares of JXI at $49.60, with $7 commission = $10,805.80 Bought 83 shares of VONE at $133.29, with $7 commission = $11,070.07 Cash left over = $27.68 DISCLAIMER: Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance.  This strategy is presented for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation to buy or sell any securities.  October is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in.  The others are July, January, September, April, November, May , March, June, December, August and February. ~ Mark Twain