Hot Diggity-Damn!

OK, this is one of those stock-geek posts. I’m sorry, I know they’re boring to, like, 99.9999% of the other human beings out there. BUT! I have just passed the Profit Point on a batch of trades. Woo-hoo, woo-hoo! {funky chicken dance}

I made a thousand bucks worth of trades three weeks ago, buying small positions in 8 different stocks. I paid $7 apiece in commissions, losing $56 to the broker. And if I wanted to sell out of them, I’d lose yet another $56 in commissions, right? So my $1000 worth of purchases has to go up by $113 before I’m actually ahead by a buck. (Ack.)

Well! As of this morning, I am officially at the point of Starting To Make A Profit. And it only took three weeks, which, on such a wee tiny little investment set, is pretty damned good. As usual, it’s a couple of them doing fabulously while another couple are doing blah (dipping up and down around my purchase price and not committing either way – but that’s OK, I bought them to be a stable base of dividend producers - their contributions will come from quarterly dividends rather than capital gains) and the other four are just sorta…truckin’ along. Surviving a freaky market where missing earnings by a fraction of a cent causes people to scream in panic and rush to sell every last share before the End of the World (hence putting the stock ‘on sale’ for the rest of us, who are less concerned with ‘this quarter’ and more concerned with ‘in fifteen years, when I hope to be retiring’).

Now I just sit back, try not to freak out if they dip back below that level (‘dip’ is OK…it’s ‘tank’ that’s scary), and wait it all out. This batch is, in my humble and probably wrong estimations, undervalued by an average of about 40%, and I expect it to take between 2 and 5 years for them to grow into their value for a total annual return of between 8% and 20%, depending on just how long it really does take.

And, I must take that crayon away from Bacon Bit. Where does he get these things?! I just swept, vacuumed, and mopped this floor not twelve hours ago…!