Today is Sunday and of course the stock market is closed. It was closed yesterday and will be closed tomorrow for MLK day (a national holiday). I wish I had more data on what happens on the next day after a holiday when the market has been closed for 3 days straight. Does it usually jump up with a lot of people trying to catch up? or does it drop a lot with people selling off? I don’t know. I have gone through other 3 day closed periods but didn’t take note of what happened. Maybe AI knows. I will have to check later.
It’s kind of boring for me though, since nothing is happening that I can watch. I guess it’s a good time for me to review and plan for my next set of purchases. Something interesting happened last Thursday. One of my stocks (AMCR) went through a 1 to 5 Reverse Split. That meant that for every 5 shares of stock that I owned, I now had 1. So I had 24 shares (plus a bit of partial shares) and according to the paperwork supplied, there were no partial shares created and the value would be paid in cash. That meant that I got 4 shares of the stock at the new price and should have gotten cash for the extra 4 point something shares. But I didn’t. Not only that, but it showed that I paid (via the cost basis) roughly 10 a share more than the stock value. Something was not right.
I called my broker and asked politely what it was that I didn’t understand. He reviewed for a while and told me that since the split had just occurred, it was likely that the program had not caught up correctly. That was on Friday, and he said that I should check again on Tuesday when the market opened up again and see if it had corrected.
So being the crazy man that I am, I checked on Saturday. Sure enough, it had caught up and I had the additional cash in my account for the 4 point something stocks. And my cost basis was caught up too. Now, I don’t know if that is standard, or if when I called, they realized that there was an error and fixed the programming. Either way, it got fixed. But if I ever have a reverse split again, I will watch very carefully!
I was surprised that it adjusted over the weekend, but I guess the program runs all the time, so it doesn’t take weekends off! I guess it has to, since some people do “extended hours” trading. I don’t do that, but some people do. I’m glad it worked out however it happened. We will have to watch it to see if the stock goes up now that it is more costly!
On another note, I have made a bit of an adjustment to my strategy. Since I can’t afford to buy all the stocks that I want, I started looking at EFTs. I now have 6 of them. Going back to my original process, I bought all high dividend ETFs. I am now looking for one or two growth ETFs that I can get into, but I haven’t completely decided which one I should buy. Just me, over thinking again. I know that the high dividend ETFs are not supposed to gain that much in value, but they should supply a fairly reliable cash flow, and then some reasonable compounding since I reinvest all dividends back into the stock.
I know that having so many is probably not the way to go. Might be better to have one dividend ETF and one growth ETF and that way I can have more money in them, which would mean higher earnings, but diversity is safety, right? I have made sure that all the EFTs that I got are not all loaded to the gills with the same stocks. In fact, I specifically looked for different ones, with different industries as their primary stocks.
Since tomorrow is a holiday and the market is closed, I guess I will take some time to review my situation. Maybe sometime next week I will take some money and put it into those stocks that I have already and just increase my position in them instead of buying more different one. I have very limited funds and really wish I had started this when I was younger!
