Bottoms up!

So they've officially announced we're out of the recession, BUT we may go back into a second recession if we aren't careful! I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like they're saying that they might be wrong about predicting the end and covering their a$$ just in case.

That said, I'm still in the market and still trudging along. It's been awhile since my last post, but there's been nothing much to post. My KRE play hasn't been doing well, but I'm still holding firm in my belief the regional banking industry will pick back up.

As the market has changed, so has my stock picking strategies. I'm no longer looking for the big breakout stocks, right now I'm simply looking for high dividend yield stocks, similar to my PGF and other dividend stocks to my portfolio.

My latest position has been in Enerplus Resources Fund (NYSE: ERF), which I believe is an Natural Gas ETF. Haha, I really just bought this on a whim. My main criteria was high dividend yield at a monthly payout and in a relatively strong investment area with upward potential. I was torn between a real estate ETF and this one. So let's see how it pans out. I bought my first third today and will be adding this to my RL portfolio shortly. I'm also reinvesting the dividend to account for any market fluctuations.

Tumult Thursday

With all the turmoil that's been going on in the market reasonable, surprisingly I'm very calm and collective about the entire situation. I'm still checking my stocks everyday, but it's mostly after the market has closed. I think the up's and down's of the market may cause a few to act irrationally and buy/sell at the wrong times.

Case in point, the dark Thursday a few weeks ago when the market crashed horribly and inexplicably for a brief half hour or so (I actually saw the actual 900 point dip totally by total chance and thought Google Finance was broken!) My immediate reaction was to buy buy buy! But unfortunately my brokerage website had some high volume usage problems so I missed the opportunity to "strengthen" my current positions. But of course, the common investor sold at this time in panic and thousands of people lost a lot of money that day once the dust settled. I would hate to be the one triggering a market price sell order at that exact moment when the market dipped! Lesson learned in many ways.

*Always do limit orders even if it's at market price to avoid inexplicable swings in pricing.

Batcat!

Morningstar ETF of the year

I hope I won't start making a habit of this, but it's been a long time between the last three posts! In my defense, there hasn't been much happening financially for me. I have been dabbling in some small shares of our local bank, Central Pacific Financial (NYSE: CPF), but it's a penny stock and is just a total gamble to help me muddle through this stagnant bull market. Again, CPF is purely for entertainment, even though I'm up 32% since buying in early March, I don't count this as a real stock pick, esp since it represents less than .3% of my total portfolio!

My latest, serious, stock pick is an ETF. It's called SPDR KBW Regional Banking (NYSE: KRE). Morningstar has deemed this the top ETF of 2010 and they do make some strong buying points. Regional banking has been lagging behind the bigger national banks, so it's about time they "catch up". Also, it's rumored that now that the bigger banks are healthier, we may see more Federal bailout monies trickling down to the smaller lenders. Hopefully this is so and we'll see multi-bagger gains on the sector. I've already initiated my second "third", since my first position was already up 15% and I don't see a downward trend anytime soon.