January 9, 2009

Updown performance: down 12%

Practice invest


My Updown account has rebounded a lot in the past month. Last time I discussed my results I was down 30% overall. Right now I'm down 12%. By comparison the S&P 500 is down about 32% in the same time period, the Dow Jones is down about 30% and the NASDAQ is off about 28%. I'm doing 16-20% better than the major stock indexes.

I bought some shares of MGM Mirage (MGM) at about $11 and it quickly spiked to $14. When I bought it I set a limit order to automatically sell it when it hit $14. So I was able to cash in a quick profit on this one due to a short term increase in price. That one trade has netted me about $7k so thats a 0.7% increase in the total $1M portfolio.

My REIT investments have improved a lot. Right now my holdings in REITs are worth about $266k. Thats around $90k more than they were last time I checked back in December. So the REIT alone is about 9% of the improvement.

Dividends are starting to pay off. In the past 30 days I've gotten about $12,000 in dividend payments from my investments. Many of these are quarterly payments so that rate won't continue every month. But $12k on a $1 million investment is still a full +1.2% increase.

Even though it is just pretend money my Updown account is a fun and useful learning tool.


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