RE: At the Cross Roads
Keith,
With an A+ rating on Eve IRA, and with new trading rules for your wife's IRA, then why not move lock, stock, and barrel into something else. With the Sypders and their derivatives, WEBs, HOLDRs, iShares, and the expected offering of Vanguard's equity funds in Spyder-like instruments, you can maintain a basket of stocks and still AIM trade them. Plus you now get intra-day trading, limit orders, options, etc. Scott Burns, in his opinion piece published today, argues that all these exchange traded shares may just put a dent in the mutual fund industry. See www.scottburns.com
I empathize with your quandry. Exit rules are just as tough as entry rules. I have only exited ONE AIM so far, then only because the stock got bought out (I sold my shares in the market a few weeks before the deal closed).
Now, I am lecturing myself to have the strength of my convictions. The argument is FOR pile everything you've got/can get into Tech stocks, especially TXN, and maybe VTSS. After all $10K invested 5 yrs ago (Buy 'n Hold) in TXN is now worth about $160k, and in VTSS case is about $250K. My view of the future for these stocks is that this performance is highly likely to repeat, the next 5 years appears to be a brighter future than what we saw 5 years ago. The argument AGAINST is YOU STUPID SH?T, ALL your ASSETS in ONE (TWO) STOCKS??? AND BORROW MONEY??? THIS IS CRAZY!!!!!! As it is, you are TOO concentrated, and you're talking about ULTIMATE concentration???
To distract myself from this argument, I have been learning about preferred stocks. Dividend rates are running 8%-9% on high quality domestic issues, and nearly 10% can be achieved on very high quality foreign issues. These are really not AIM-able investments. It takes pronounced moves in interest rates to have a significant impact on prices. In this respect, they are much like a bond fund. Tom can tell us just how often he trades his bond fund.
Robert- Mr AIM Aggressive |
