Presidents Day. The Stock Market is closed. Tomorrow will be horrible, I think. Usually after a 3 day weekend the next day is just a jumble of people trying to get stuff done. A lot of that is selling and the stock prices show it.
I’ve been trying to find good deals outside the AI world, and I think everyone else is doing that too. So many times, I go to check on one of my choices and see that in the last 5 days, the stock has already gone up 10 dollars or more. Big percentages. These are stocks like Clorox, Colgate-Palmolive and McCormic. Companies that are outside of AI but still somebody that I think have great products. I can’t get myself to buy after a big spike like that. I used to and then the stock would fall back to “normal” levels and I have an overpriced stock. Once bitten, twice shy.
But anyway, I see that my usual good players like Palantir and Nvidia are not doing well. Lots of articles promising good things but I don’t know. I’m not increasing my positions on any of them. I’ve taken to buying 10 shares at a time, since I found you can do doodily with just one share. I have a few of the one or two share stocks and I can’t afford where they have gone up to if I wanted more.
So I will continue to watch and wait. I had planned to do some changes but just when I was about to sell a stock that hadn’t moved in a year, it suddenly starts to go up. Some of that I think is people getting out of the Info Tech stocks and looking for something else. But there are so many things happening. The president has said he’s reducing the tariffs on steel, but I don’t know if he ever did. He also keeps saying he’s going to attach this country or that country and then says he is trying to use diplomacy instead. So, some of the stocks that are based on the military use, like Lockheed Martin may not go as fast as we thought or might go faster! I can’t afford Lockheed Martin anyway!
I am starting a new project for fun. I am tracking the stocks in the S&P500 as a group, kind of like an ETF but without weight. I found that most ETFs the claim to follow the S&P 500 are almost 30 percent Mag 7 stocks. That means that if Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple all go down 10 percent, then the S&P500 goes down the same or close to the same amount, even when other stocks that are only a .2 percent piece of the pie are doing well. I’m thinking that ETFs that follow the S&P are just not worth it. But I want to see how it is if all the stocks are each just one share and how it moves. That way even if all the mag 7 go down (or up) it won’t make a big difference. We’ll see. It’s all pretended of course. The value of buying one share of every stock is over 126 thousand dollars. HA!
