Last month I decided to bump my 401K contribution up to 30%. This change took place in my last pay check 2 weeks ago. And you know what? It wasn’t so bad. Getting promoted certainly help since my bump in my salary may have eased the pain a bit. This was good timing since I fully funded my emergency fund at the time of my promotion and I was going to contribute this amount regardless if I was getting promoted or not. In reality, a savings of 30% a pay check translated to only a decrease of $300 of my initial take home from last month. This will also decrease my taxable income for next tax season so I don’t give the government more than they deserve of my hard-earned money. Unfortunately, they cap the total amount of pretax dollars you can put in your 401K to $15K per year. I’m guessing they will stop me from my 30% savings by time Christmas roles around. This would be great timing since I’ll have extra cash for presents! It’ll be like a bonus every holiday season. 
I’m also not strapped for cash these days. I actually have a good amount of pocket change that is more than enough for a typical week’s miscellaneous expenditures.
Next step, buy investment properties…
What I thought was a sure thing turned out to be a pretty big mistake. I lost 4.1% of my position in GLD in a matter of 6 days. Talk about volatile. I’m still watching GLD, XLE, and now EWJ which focuses on Japan. It’s looking like Japan might be starting a new trend pretty soon. But I’m going to be a little bit more cautious about this one.
I’m also learning that I have to be constantly monitoring my 401K’s portfolio. Within the past 2 months, my mutual funds have crept up higher and higher and now would be a bad time for me to jump into them since they seem to be overbought. Oh well, lesson learned.
After seeing signs that I can make a few bucks from GLD, I decided to jump back into the fund. The signs are there for a good upswing: the price today crossed the 200 day moving average, entered above the upper Bollinger Band, RSI indicates that it isn’t oversold or overbought, and finally the cross in the MACD line indicating a potential bullish uptrend. Don’t forget to look at the price. We’ve got 6 consecutive up days.
Finally sold my energy position yesterday at a loss. Can’t believe XLE fell over 3% in one day! Thank goodness SHY’s dividend will help ease the pain. I suppose the news that they found more source of oil may have caused this recent downturn. In any case September-October is suppose to be historically bad months for the market. I’ll just sit in cash and international position and watch. So far international isn’t so hot either.
An attempt to recapture the Vegas feeling, I went back to Hustler and played a round of NL poker. Busted out my $50 buy-in in about an hour. Man, what a string of bad luck. I haven’t won since the eve of my birthday camping trip. When you’re not catching cards, you’re not catching cards. I was fairly content with how I played.
Made my move today. Gold fell down to it’s 50 day moving average so I got out at $61.15. A 3% loss for GLD but very minimal damage to my overall portfolio. Looks like XLE is heading south as well. If it reaches its 50 day moving average, I’ll be out as well.
I was just looking over my choice of funds in my 401K and positioned myself in for GIEIX. This fund has been doing very well in the past 2 months since I dropped it from my portfolio nearly 60 days ago. It’s gone up a good 13% since June 14. I might be in it too late, but it looks like the trend is up for this fund so I’m taking a gamble on this one with 33% of my 401K. In any case my stop loss is in place just in case my hunch is wrong.
This past weekend I was at the Bay Area with the first intention of attending a wedding and hanging out with a couple of friends. The cool weather was very welcoming considering the that Southern California was hot and humid the week before. We spent some time hanging out by the pool on Saturday and attended the reception party. It was a nice wedding. The food was good, the bride was pretty, and everything seemed very organized. We had our typical 10 course meal (although really 9 course since the mango pudding never came ) . The drive home was relaxing and mellow. I didn’t do much driving up but took about 3/4 of the drive back. Unfortunately the ability for photos was lost during a recent migration to another server, but I’ll have my guy help me resolve this issue when he gets back from vacation in Asia. In the mean-time you should be able to view some photos on the bride’s MySpace.
On another note, my ETF positions have been doing good for me. It went over the 1% mark for my entire IRA portfolio. I know that doesn’t seem like alot but considering only 25% of my portfolio is helping me gain that 1% profit. I’m still positioned in since I feel that energy and gold still have a ways to go as far as gaining more profits. As of the end of trading today, both was yielding a 2.8% gain. If either one loses 1/2 I may make that my exit point.
All my funds came over from Vanguard last week into my Scottrade account. I finally positioned myself in the following ETFs: SHY, XLE, and GLD. Because Scottrade’s cash position did not have any money market that came close to the yield of 4+% from my old money market fund, SHY was a recommended position. Its basically some a bond fund consisting of US Treasury Notes yielding between 2.6-4.7%. Its a relatively safe ETF which pays out monthly dividends yielding about 4.2+%. I’m 75% in SHY while the remaining 25% was split between XLE and GLD. XLE is my energy play whereas GLD is my position in gold. Both XLE and GLD performed well today. They’re both poised for a potentially higher trend with both being above their 200 day MA and right at their 50 day MA as well as making newer highs. Sitting in cash in my 401K is rather dull, but I’m waiting for more positive signs to move into the right position.
It’s some pretty scary times if you’re in the market right now. I had to assess my own portfolio and found that I’m only down 0.31% since the start of the year. Not bad considering that I had some pretty big losses in my 401K account. Thankfully I moved to cash at a timely manner. Next step is moving my Rollover IRA into Scottrade so I can begin trading some Bear Funds. Oh yeah, there are finally Bear market ETFs. I’ll be monitoring those closely. Moving to Scottrade should also get me situated for the next Bull market. Hopefully I can reach my 20% annual growth this year. I’m 8% behind where I should be.
On a side note, I told you Miami was going to be the NBA Champions. Now if I was only this good in predicting the market… 
As of Wednesday this week, I am 100% in cash. I missed on the 2nd day bounce but after seeing my international fund drop 16% since I first got into the position and my small cap fund hit my stop-loss mark of 10% the previous day, I had enough. That’s a hefty loss on 30% of my portfolio. I’m up a couple of percent on the remaining 70% of my portfolio. I really should just figure out how much I’ve loss since the beginning of 2006. June has been a pretty bad month to be in the market. I’m looking for some Bear market funds to get into. Here are the funds I’m monitoring:
RYSHX
RYCWX
RYMHX
URPIX – I’m specifically watching this closely since this is a complete inverse of the S&P 500. From what I understand, for every 1% S&P 500 drops, this fund hedges twice as much. Unfortunately, if the S&P 500 rises like yesterday, you will lose twice as much. I haven’t got into position yet only because the 70% of my portfolio is parked in a rollover IRA where they don’t give you the choice of other fund families. I will be moving to Scottrade soon.
My second playoff game came sooner that I had expected. Because of some unfortunate reason, I was offered the opportunity to see the Clippers again last night against the Suns in Game 6 of their series. Again the Clippers was victorious and forced a deciding Game 7 at Phoenix. It was very entertaining and our seats this time was at center court but still at the nose-bleeds. Thank goodness it was the Staples Center since it didn’t matter where we sat we were still in the middle of the action. I brought my Adalyn to her first NBA game ever. She was excited. Everything was fine until near the end when some dude 2 rows back fell over and push the guy behind us on her. She’s a little banged up on the shins, but I think she’ll be fine. What a way to enjoy the action after a nail-biting conclusion to my Spurs‘ game the night before where they inched by the Mavs by 1 point to foce a Game 6.
On another unrelated note, I finally put 59% of my position into cash. My trailing stop-loss mark was actually met today so I had to make that switch to cash to reduce further damage by this recent bearish market. Hopefully I’ll have to see if my move was right. Moving your money out of position seems a bit overwhelming. I am worried about the fees and tax implications. But since its in a roll-over IRA, I don’t think I have any issues with tax since an IRA’s capital gain does not impact my taxes since this is tax deferred. Also the money market mutual fund’s overall fee is only 0.13% per year. That’s about just a meal a year so no biggie. Now I have to do the same with the remaining 41% of my portfolio. Unfortunately, this one is in my 401K so I have to wait for a recent transaction I initiated. On May 12th, I moved the majority of that portfolio into a Small Cap and International Fund. Both sectors suffered a 6% decline so far since then. I would have only lost about 4% if I left it the way it was in multiple funds. Oh well, live and learn. I’m willing to move that into cash as soon as we hit about 10-12% stop-loss. Hopefully this will happen later since I can initiate another transaction. Only crappy part in dealing with my 401K is that you’re only allowed 2 transactions a month.
On a positive note, I’m looking to be completely debt free next Friday. I think I’m going to have it on video of me screaming, “I’m debt free!!!”, much like how those Dave Ramsey callers do it on his radio show. Hopefully I can post that on here when it happens.
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