Apologies

I haven't posted in over six months, and I know that is not a good blogger's way of doing things. I will be more diligent in posting in the future. The market has been slowly rising since my last post, but has become flat, and a little volatile recently. Could be a sign of a top, but we've been saying that for how long now? This month, no activity, as far as any transactions, but quite a few in Cathy's in the last few months. This is actually the first one in four months that I haven't sold stock in her account. Mine had a couple at the end of last year/beginning of this year. We are accumulating quite a bit of cash in both of our accounts, and I am feeling pretty good that if something drastic were to happen in the market, we'd be in good shape. I can have full confidence that we would at least be able to buy a substantial amount of stock if the market were to tank. I know, that is a pretty general statement. How about - we're both now approaching 30% cash in our accounts. Now, ideally, at the top of a bull run, you want to be at 50% cash, but I don't think this thing has finished quite yet. I was just a few dollars from selling another batch in my account this month. At least we have a good amount now, as opposed to in 2009, when we were both scraping the bottom of the barrel. By the way, I did open new accounts (IRAs) for my older sons, and used the criteria for the stocks as mainly the amount of dividends they pay, as well as the price (to start.) The dividends are all pretty close to 5% on all the stocks, and they are all under $30. Since both boys have less than $2000 to invest, I had to keep the stock prices as low as possible. A lot of them are under $20. There aren't very many recognizable stocks in the bunch, other than H & R Block, AT&T, and GE, but I figure the dividends being paid make up for that. I didn't go nuts on the amount of the dividends. I know that if you get a company paying 9% or more, that can be a bad sign. I checked to see how long they had been paying them to make sure they are relatively stable. I've done 3 updates so far, and neither account has moved much. Of course, neither has the market in general. You can be sure that if there is an upheaval either way, the stocks will move. That is the only thing in the stock market that is a sure thing.