Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Greetings From New & Improved Princess

In Bermuda today at the venerable Hamilton Princess. It has gotten a much needed renovation, but it is still a very expensive hotel.  Every time I come here, I think about looking for a less expensive option.

Not much news on the investing front.  These past two days have been so busy work wise that I have done nothing besides watch it go down.  At least I am going down more slowly!  I feel like I am doing terrible, but in fact it isn't so bad.  I know in reality (thinking back to 2008) that it can be much, much worse.  It does seem like mid caps and smaller caps are really falling out of favor.  It is funny, I predicted that back in April-May; but even though I predicted it, it is causing me disproportionate pain. The IWM is down 4% in September while the SPY is about flat.

I continue to sit in a ton of cash. So while the melting down of the market is never fun, I tell myself that securities I want to buy are getting cheaper every day.


4 comments:

Unknown said...

Marsh,

I have been locked out of your Blog for a week. Missed you for sure. Glad to see the sort on the new MFI is the same 100m. That is what your 8 years of numbers are based on. Usually this will produce only about 30 names over 1 billion.

I assume you will use Random.ORG to pick 5 names off this sort. There are 10 right now so are you going to use Random.Org?

I may go for a 25% allocation in April 2015!

msmith1862 said...

http://www.gurufocus.com/news/280572/joel-greenblatt-smallcap-stocks-are-more-expensive-now-than-in-past

Marsh_Gerda said...

John - good to be back live. Sorry about the lock down. I have not really thought about how I will do the random pick. I was thinking about writing stocks on index cards and shuffling. But I could use a website.

Marsh_Gerda said...

I researched the random question. When I took Social psychology this summer, we touched on creating random samples. the site is called randomizer.org and does exactly what I need. You simply say I want 5 unique/random numbers between 1 and 10 (or however many stocks you have). Hit enter and Voila: 2,4,1,8,9 in my test. Obviously I would have numbered my 10 stocks 1 through 10 before that and now I know to go with CSCO, CA, HRB, BKE and RGR. (not the official run).