A friend of mine asked me this after the markets closed on Monday, Sept 15th when the Dow dropped precipitously. Honestly, that was a great market day for me. I had been losing all kinds of money on paper the week before, but I had two stocks payout dividends on that day, and because rumors were that Warren Buffett was in talks to rescue AIG, my BRKB shares rose enough to start covering some of my paper loses.
I will admit that my 401k plan didn’t look too hot, but I had also just made a contribution to that account with my paycheck, so it covered the losses in the account.
The next day, my trading account looked the best it’s been in a long time. BRKB rose so much that I’m actually at the break even point. (Which takes into account my commission costs for buying, but not any for selling.)
I was sorely tempted to sell one share of BRKB and then use it to buy BAC at a depressed price and double down one a few other stocks, but I realized the foolishness of this idea and just left it alone.
Writing this post finally got me off my butt to calculate some information about a mutual fund I’m holding. Basically in 2005 I rolled over some mutual fund shares from an old 401k. I had about 72 shares when I left my old firm and I now have 82 shares with steady dividend reinvestment over the last three years. Not too bad. 10 more shares for doing nothing but holding. I have had about 6% average annual rate of return for the last 3 years holding this stuff which isn’t great, but we shall see what happens when the market rebounds. I can hold this stuff forever and it’s in the rebound that I will average out my investment returns, I hope.
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