Settling Down
April was a crazy month! But it really went fast didn’t it? It did for me anyway. I can barely believe that we are at the start of a new month. There are two full moons this month (I think they call the second one a “blue moon”). One just occurred and maybe that’s why I feel a little off today! I have been watching the market with great interest. Seems like for most of the past month, all the stocks have been down, likely because of the War in Iran. The price of gasoline went up over 40 cents in April. One day last week, my wife and I went out to dinner (first time in months!) and on our way to the restaurant we passed a gas station and saw the price. On the way home, the same gas station had raised it’s price by 7 cents a gallon! I guess we’d better stop going out!
The price of gas is of course, driving up prices everywhere. Delivery fees climbed up so the price of groceries went up too. We generally have some lunch delivered to us 3 days a week. That covers Wednesday lunch and dinner, Thursday and Friday Lunches and Saturday and Sunday lunches. We only eat half of each meal. Our other meals we cook ourselves. The cost of each delivery has gone up about 3 dollars last week as the place we buy from has increased their prices while facing all the same issues of delivery costs of their food, and other expenses. We may have to cut back on that expense, but I’m not sure how.
I think it’s funny that the reporters take the cost of food and gasoline out of their equation for inflation. They are trying to make it seem like inflation isn’t that bad. But we will NOT BE FOOLED! It stinks!
Anyway… I am trying to find a good plan for upgrading my portfolio. I am still way down in Sofi and SMCI computers. Both did really well when I first bought them but have since sunk into the quagmire. SMCI went down because of bad management, and I have no idea why Sofi went down. FMC and BBAI are both down for me as well and I just don’t know what I am going to do with them. I’m not heavily invested in either of them, but still, they are down below what I paid. The one that surprises me the most is Dollar General. I thought with prices of everything going up that they would go gangbusters. Nope.
But let’s stop concentrating on the bad things and look at the good ones. Palantir is still my swan song. I bought in at 25 dollars and it’s up to around 145 dollars now. I’ve also seen some big gains in NVidea, Micron, AMD, and Walmart. So even with the big losers, I am still up over 15% which is ok by me. I am looking hard at Tractor Supply and Clorox as new purchases, but I have been trying to get myself to increase my position in the stocks I have rather than buying into new ones. Shoot, I have 60 lines in my list of stocks and it’s rough keeping up with it all. I keep telling myself that I need to stick to the plan, but it’s not easy!
I have a few ETFs that I am sending 25 dollars a month to. The plan is to rotate which one I buy into through the ones I have. I will take 25 dollars from each of my interest payments in my money market and use that to rotate into the ETFs on a monthly basis. The other stocks I will increase here and there using extra money I get set aside, like I got a payment from my bank the other day from a mistake they made back in 2022 (pandemic days) so I have put that into my brokerage account and will find good places to put it to increase my current stock positions. I also just got my tax refund which I will use to bump them up a little bit as well.
