Trades for 11/10/09

Made 3 new trades today, all in stocks I've been in before.
HURC @ $15.30
ARAY @ $5.66
IRE @ $11.75

I view IRE as a speculative play.  They are a troubled Irish bank that was down as much as 10%.  I'm looking for a bit of a bounce here and will tighten stops as it moves up.

HURC and ARAY are both companies that we punished in the last downturn.  Both currently stand at a point with no debt.  Should the turn around be real, I think these could move up.

All positions were initiated with a 10% trailing stop to protect downside and lock in upside, should it occur.  I may look at tightening the stops should we see some quick gains.

This brings me to my current mindset with IRA accounts.  In my mind I think the market has rallied too much and is actually set up for a correct.  I've thought this since July and have lost ground to the market by having some position on the short side of the market or by simply being in cash.  My current philosophy is trade around this uncertainly, by making trades protected by stops to limit the downside.

Disclosure - links go to MarketWatch my current employer.

Background and Current State

In late 2006, my wife and I decided to fire our financial planner and start to keep track of our own retirement funds. This included old 401k accounts that we rolled into IRAs and our current companies 401ks. Currently, we have no investments outside of though 2 IRAs and 2 401ks.

Taking 01/01/2007 as a starting point, here are the annual return of all 4 combined accounts

-2007 : +15.34%

-2008 : -45.55%

-2009(as of 11/6/9) : +27.45%

Note: I currently am using Google docs to keep track of things. I use the XIRR function to account for monthly inflow to the 401k accounts.

Currently, I've been lagging the markets for the last few months, as I've taken a more conservative bent on the markets. I'm under the impression that markets have run too far, too fast given underlying fundamentals. However the market seems to be providing us with evidence to the contrary.

In my next post I'll talk more about the make up and current status of the 4 accounts, as well as provide more about my thoughts and strategy.

Meanwhile here is a link to an interesting article I read on one of my favorite financial sites on the web, Minyanville. In it writer John Maudlin discusses the possible approaches to getting out of this financial mess, or ways we could make it worse, All America's Possible Futures.