Monday, March 05, 2007

CNBC Million Dollar ($) Portfolio Challenge Trivia Questions

I intend to post the answers to as many of the CNBC portfolio challenge questions as possible. Triva Q/A will be in the comments section of this posting.

For answers to the 2008-2009 Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge click here.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Adding to Four Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP) Holdings

Before deploying to Afghanistan, I stopped my automatic purchase plan in all of my DRIPS. I felt that the stock market had run it's course and I wanted to keep new money on the sidelines. Now, the broad market sell off has created a buying opportunity. I'm not saying that the market is done going down. However, I feel that a person can cherry-pick from the listed securities to find some safe bets. Plus, in DRIPS, I frequently make small purchase which in itself is somewhat forgiving if the market goes down further.

I'm adding to my position in the following DRIPS:

3M (MMM)
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
Bank of America (BAC)
Budweiser (BUD)

I have a free subscription to Morningstar.com thru my employer. I frequently use Moringstar and Yahoo Finance to find suitable value stocks. Based on Morningstar/Yahoo Finance, I feel that the above stocks are at least 25% below their intrinsic value.

The additional beauty of the above stocks is that I already have DRIPS in them and my subsequent purchases cost $0.

My other DRIP positions are (Lowes, Yahoo and Home Depot have DRIP fees):
Exxon Mobil (XOM)
Lowes (LOW)
Yahoo (YHOO)
Home Depot (HD)
Southern Company (SO)
Aflac (AFL)

Making Investment Decisions by Cherrypicking What Warren Buffett Owns

The "seekingalpha" website recently ran an article about mimicking Warren Buffet's investment decisions. This article is the first one i've seen that succinctly summarizes all of Warren Buffet's holdings.

The article is from Feb '07. Thus, some of the info is a little dated. For instance, I think Warren Buffett has already sold his Target shares.

If You Like Sharebuilder.com, You'll Probably Like This Lower Cost Rival

I stumbled on the following microvest website today. It offers $3 real time limit orders and no annual cost. It also offers $2 and $1.5 trades if you pay a monthly fee.

The website is called sogoinvest. I'm not a user of the site. I'm considering converting over my sharebuilder account. Meanwhile, i'm also considering converting my scottrade account over to tradeking.com.