What is happening?
So today was supposed to be the end of the ceasefire in Iran. And it seems that Iran took that literally and attacked a couple of ships out in the Strait of Hormuz. Our current president took a different view and says he is extending it until Iran comes up with a real proposal. This time he didn’t put a date on it. So now it’s even worse as far as I see it. Oh well.
The good thing is that the Stock Market seems to be holding up pretty well. I was up about a thousand dollars this morning but it has come down since then. I can’t really tell any trends on anything. The oil stocks like Chevron and Exxon have been just steady. No great changes there. I don’t know where all the changes are taking place yet.
Reviewing my positions
I had a good time the last few days reviewing my positions with CoPilot. I gave it all the stocks that I own and my cost basis and quantity. Then I asked it how I was doing. As I continued to ask questions and about the diversification or the security, or balance etc. I kind of felt like it thought I was the president. It kept complimenting me and telling me how good I was doing. I did finally get it to make some suggestions on my plan to add a few new stocks, and it just seemed to tell me I would be doing the exact right thing, but when I said I was going to wait a bit on it, it told me that was the right thing to do also. But it did lay out a nice schedule of rotating my monthly investment through the best of the ETFs.
I told CoPilot that I was going to invest 25 dollars a month, in my ETFs and rotate through them and it asked for advice. It gave me a rotation calendar, or list of priority purchases. Something like Month 1 – SCHD, Month 2 – HDV, etc. It only rotated through 4 of them. My big dividend payers and my new renewable energy ETF. Basically, I have a money market account that pays interest every month, and I use 25 dollars of each monthly payment and leave the rest to compound. So as an example, if I get interest of 40 dollars, I take 25 out and put it into my chosen ETF and leave the 15 dollars in the account.
I then indicated that once in a while, I get a bit of extra cash and asked how I should use it. It gave me a few specific stocks that I should focus on and a priority list so which ones I should buy on the first “extra money” bunch and then the next one when I get more money.
I changed it around. I used the stocks that it mentioned and added a couple more. Then I made a spreadsheet so that I could divide up any money I got into those stocks. I only do this on the spreadsheet only. If I get $200, I put 50 into one stock, and 30 into the other 5 stocks. The next time I get some extra, I put the larger amount into one of the other stocks and spread the rest out to the other 5. The spreadsheet just kind of records how much I have allocated to the each of the stocks and I also have the spreadsheet automatically load the cost of a share of the stock. Now, the 6 stocks that I am doing this with, will probably change a little as time goes on. Maybe every time I use the money for a particular stock purchase, I might decide to do a different one, but I am only concentrating on 6 stocks at a time. And these are all my dividend paying stocks.
For my growth stocks, I will use some extra income when it is rather large, like maybe a tax refund or something like that. Then I will look at getting some more of my growth stocks or possibly purchasing into a different company. I have a few ideas that I am considering and have been for a while.
