Investing 102

[GregWeld]

Sitting in Scottsdale waiting for my wife to finish her walk.... I decided to check on my Schwab account to see if there was any "useful" information I could add to the thread...

This account was started (opened) around January 2011 with "new" money... and yeah -- it was a tidy sum -- but that has not been nor should be the point here... my point is that even with a sizable investment of new cash which all needed to be put to work.. there are ONLY 21 positions all of which are "new" investments.

So I went to the Schwab page that shows "unrealized" gains/loss. There are 21 positions none more than 18 months old... so all bought in this "rising" market.

Of the 21 positions:

4 have a capital "loss" --- the highest "loss" (red number) is $1246.00 on a $200K position. The smallest is $474.00 on a $60K position (1000 shares of Coinstar just picked up a month ago after earnings report).

Now... that leaves the gainers:

A $94,000.00 gain in Phillip Morse (PM)... to the smallest $22.00 gain in Verizon (VZ)

The account is UP $509,000.00 as of Fridays close... and I've been receiving dividends which ARE NOT reinvested. If they were I'd be up much much more.

So if you'd have just put in $10K at the same time - you'd be up at least 6 or 7% and you'd be up MORE if you'd reinvested the dividends.

So this is back to my earlier post -- that you can forget all the TV talking heads telling you this that and something else. Only one out of 21 positions is speculative (the 1000 shares of Coinstar). All the rest are just good names countered with some higher paying dividend payers (Annaly - NLY) and a couple corporate bonds.

So here's another point - which is Investing 102. Even if the market goes DOWN from here... I'm still getting dividends (almost $400K per year off this account) and it would have to go DOWN $500K to get me back to even! And it may very well do that... but it will - over time - go right back up and continue to make that relentless march UP on the chart that these stocks have done for many many years.