Last Saturday, San and I went to volunteer for the Oliver Crest foster home at the CBS lot. It was my second year participating and we had a great time. We helped the kids create decorate popsicle frames so they can use it for their picture with Santa. And hand-full of people from APAF showed up. We grabbed a quick shot with Santa here:
Yesterday I was surprised with an offer to watch the Clippers play the Milwaukee Bucks. I finally got to experience the game in a box seat at a suite. The suite was rented out by NBC Universal. It was weird to see our company logo on the walls and on the furniture.
What an October this will be in terms of guilty-pleasure consumption. There are 3 things I’m looking forward to buying this month.
- Radiohead’s highly anticipated 7th album, In Rainbows (October 10th)
- An Apple system with the new Leopard operating system (In October)
- NBA 2K8 Xbox 360 game (October 2nd)
I’ve already pre-ordered the game and will be placing my order for the Radiohead’s disc box set soon ($80). I am still debating about adding another computer system. It’ll probably be a little after the initial release of Leopard just so I can read about other people’s experience. It’ll be my first OSX system.
WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS MY FRIEND!
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… 
Its a sad sad day. Both teams I’ve been rooting for has been knocked out of the NBA Playoffs. My San Antonio Spurs lost in OT against the Dallas Mavericks and the Phoenix Suns ran over the LA Clippers by 20 points. Now its Dallas Mavericks vs. Phoenix Suns. Both team have similar playing styles. But I have to say Dallas has a much deeper bench and a better all around players. The Suns are way too small in my opinion to go heads up with Dallas. I’m picking Dallas for the West. As for the East, the Detroit Pistons revealed some weakness during the Cleveland series. Miami Heats needs to see what Cleveland did right and attack that. My pick for the East goes to the Heats. And finally Heats as the NBA champs. The East is much stronger than the West so I’m sure East will win the championship regardless.
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.
I never thought my first NBA Playoff game would be for the Clippers of all team. Thanks to Shon, I was treated to a very good basketball game between the Phoenix Suns and the Clips. Even got a “Clipper Nation” tshirt. To top it off, the Clips beat the Suns! What a series. Now its tied with 2 games a piece heading back to Phoenix for game 5. Clips in 6!
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