Changing the Rules

For 2009, I'm planning to start my portfolio anew - take my lumps, transfer the remnants of my 2008 portfolio into my main account, and start afresh for the new year with $10,000 in cash and a lot of hope that this year will be better than the last one.

I'm also going to make a few changes in my investment strategy:

• I'm going to limit this portfolio to true penny stocks.  Even though any stock that trades under $5 a share is considered a penny stock, I'll stick to OTC and Pink Sheet securities here.
  
• I'm going to tighten my tolerance for loss, from 50% to 33.3%, and set stop-loss orders in advance to make sure I don't waver.  Once a stock has lost a third of its value, it's gone.

I'm also considering a few changes to the nature of the blog:

• Doing a weekly summary seems excessive - I will change to either bi-weekly or monthly, and look for a widget of some kind to show the status of my portfolio live.
  
• I'll post a bit more about stocks that I'm considering, even those I don't buy into, and do a bit less in the way of regurgitating press releases about the ones I own unless the news is relevant to a buy/sell decision.
  

Perhaps that will work out for the better, in the end?

A Very Bad Year

2008 is finally over, and it's been a very bad year for my investments.  At the closing bell today, my portfolio looks like this:

And over the course of the year ...

Not much to celebrate on this New Year's Eve, but reason enough for drinks aplenty.

While I'm disappointed, I'm not entirely morose: there are good years and bad years, and this has been one of the worst in recent memory.  

Weekly Summary

It's just two weeks until the end of a very bad year, and here's where things stand:


In the next couple of weeks, I'll be selling off some of these dogs to take capital losses - not that I don't have losses aplenty in my main portfolio, but when deciding which stocks to keep and which to sell, most of these have little prospect for improvement.

Weekly Summary

Virtually nothing has changed ...



.... not much to say.

Weekly Summary

I've not updated my blog in the past couple of weeks - partly because I was traveling during the Thanksgiving holiday, partly because it's been a horrific bloodbath that I'd rather not watch:


Things are still stinking, and there's not much hope that will change. Within the next few weeks, I'll start dumping the biggest losers to take a tax write-off - and I expect others will do the same, driving the market further down than it already is.

Weekly Summary

Another week has passed, and things continue to slip deeper into the red:


There's still no sign of a turn-around, and not much point in getting in deeper - so for now, I'll continue to ride it out.

Weekly Summary

At the end of this week, I'm back to where I was a couple weeks ago:


I'm still hopeful that the market has reached its bottom - but since there's not much time left in the year, I doubt I'll be recovering. Looking ahead, I'll probably ride out the year without adding to my portfolio, but just ride it out instead and hope for a better one in 2009.