Call it a whim, but I’m short term bullish. I just put in a market order for 100 shares of TOT. It will execute the trade at market open tomorrow. I’m also very happy about my JNJ buy-write. It has worked nicely so far; I collected my dividend, and I’m about 50/50 to close out the option+position on Friday for a modest profit.
These are Crazy Ivan Account (CIA) trades. My “sane and steady” portfolio is much unchanged. I reallocated about 2% from equities to TIPS — a relatively big move by my standards. I also moved about $13K from equities to the newly re-opened Vanguard Convertible Securities Fund. I viewed this latter move as largely an equities to equities move. Both of these transitions are in my tax-differed accounts. My taxable accounts are largely unchanged except for certain modest real-estate-related actions.
The common theme of my recent moves is pursuit of yield. I’ve typically had a larger than typically overall cash holding in my portfolio. I’ve preferred cash yielding 3-4% to bonds yielding 4-5% simply because of the flexibility. In the same vein I’ve been pretty dogmatic about using any “spare cash” to pay down even my personal and company ~4-5% mortgage(s)/HELOC(s). But with long bonds yielding 3% and cash yielding next to 0%, I’ve had to reinvent my investing posture. Convertibles, munis, real estate, and modestly high-yield value stocks are gradually creeping into my investment mix.
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