Five lessons learned from the stock market collapse

Jon and I didn’t start thinking seriously about investing until after our wedding in October, 2007. You’ve probably  heard that month mentioned a lot lately in the news, and it’s not because everyone’s excited about our 1.5 year anniversary. No, if you’ve heard a newscaster mention “October, 2007,” it was probably followed by the words, [...]

Am I a good stock picker?

Four times in my life I have thought: “That would be a good stock to buy.” And all of those times, it turned out I was right. The first time was when Chipotle went public. It was Jon’s idea; we were eating there often at the time, and he mentioned that he thought it would be [...]

And once again, we ask: should we buy more GE stock?

It’s that time of the month again: when Jon looks at GE’s slumping stock price and can’t resist. (Hey, Warren Buffet couldn’t resist either.) It’s now at $17.81, down from about $32 when we first bought it earlier this year. That means the dividend yield is almost 7 percent. GE recently declined to raise the [...]

In praise of index funds

Wow, it’s been a rough week in the market, hasn’t it? My IRA is now down 35 percent. Even VDC, the consumer products ETF I bought a couple weeks ago, is down 15 percent.
And we sure picked a bad time to start playing around with buying individual stocks. Except for RQI, a real estate ETF [...]

Should we buy MORE GE?

General Electric now has a 5 percent dividend yield. If the stock is good enough for Warren Buffett, who just invested $3 billion, it seems like it should be good enough for me. On the other hand, a lowly individual investor such as myself could never get the deal Warren got: a 10 percent annual yield with [...]