Month End Summary – July 2008

I’m glad to be done with July.  I finished the month with a realized gain of $736.04, but have a pile of paper losses waiting for a rebound or to be realized when I close my positions.  On paper, I lost $4,434.45, but the bright side of that is that I was down around $7,000 briefly.  I’m heading in the right direction again, finally.  I’m still doing better than all the major indexes for the past year except for the S&P Midcap 400.  I have a lot of time value that is available to deteriorate and expect a good August.

My current account value according to Quicken is $95,973.14.14 and according to TD Ameritrade is $96,348.21.  I’m planning to skip making a deposit in August since I sent in double my normal deposit in July.  I did that for no other reason than I wanted to hit $100,000 by my July 6th birthday.  I came within $500 and then the bottom fell out of some of my holdings while I struggled to find a plug for the drain.  Along with my double deposit to this account in July, we took a vacation to New York and that took chunk out of what we usually invest.  We were overdue for a vacation, so I don’t regret spending money on travel at all.  At least we used Sky Miles for a free flight.  The rest was on food, rental car and our hotel.

Here’s how I compare the major indexes:

• 12 month Return: -6.23%
• Annualized Since 4/8/07 (blog’s beginning): -0.98%
• Deposits for month: $5,000 on 7/1/08

According to Morningstar, here’s how the major indexes have done over the past 12 months:

• 1 year S&P 500 Return: -11.07%
• 1 year Dow Jones Return: -11.12%
• 1 year NASDAQ Return: -9.82%
• 1 year Russell 2000: -7.12%
• 1 year S&P Midcap 400:  -4.70%

The VIX has popped higher very briefly and ended the month at 22.94 and the VXN is dropped to 26.24 after also peaking mid-month to around 33.

I’m going to try to make a small change.  I need to focus on my job more and investing less until I can improve my inner-office rankings among the other recruiters.  I’m third now and want to get to second as my next work goal.  The number one guy has been there two years longer than I have, so I have a longer trek to catch him and he doesn’t use work time to invest his own money or blog.  To reach my work goal, my investing and blogging might suffer, but it means that I’ll have more money for investing which in turn means I’ll have more to blog about.  (Hmmmm, seems I’m already ready to talk myself out of it.) 

I’m still ahead of my investing goals.  What I’m trying to focus on is increasing my annual income through all channels – Recruiting (my real profession this year), Investing and Blogging – and focusing on work will drive the most growth.  Once I can get better residuals built up, I can let my work focus stray a little more.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be posting every week, probably multiple times still, but more likely like this week, with less trades or more trades on the same days instead of spread out.  That will let me add them all into one post. This should be a temporary change.