Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Stock Market

I've been kind of ignoring the performance of my investments for the last few months, for a few reasons. First, I cashed out a good chunk of them to free up cash for my condo. Then, the market was so stagnant for a while that it just seemed really boring! Also, during these months that I've been living without internet access at home, I haven't been able to download updated share prices into Quicken, so it just hasn't been as easy to check things on a daily basis. Yes, I can still look at my balances from work, but I just don't bother to do it as often.
But I did just now, and the good news is that my E*Trade accounts are doing quite well! My Roth IRA account has been on a nice steady climb since August, pretty much tracking the S&P 500. My regular investment portfolio is following a similar path. Unfortunately, I sold off some of my real winners, so now I'm a little behind the S&P, where I used to tend to be a bit ahead. Oh well! Someday soon I'll take a look at whether I need to make some changes to my portfolio. I can't look at my 401k account in quite the same way, but they claim my year to date personal rate of return is 9.8%, so I guess I'm happy! But that is another account that I should re-examine soon to see if I want to pick some new funds. I think it's a good idea not to fiddle around too much with buying and selling funds in a portfolio, but you need a periodic check to make sure things are working, and if they're not, make changes.

2 comments:

Bitty said...

I just dropped in to wish you a happy Thanksgiving, and from this it looks like you have a few more things to be thankful for! Happy turkey day!

Adventures In Money Making said...

my 401k is up 12.98% too!!! thats actually the same as the S&P500 but its much more 'diworsified'.