Lagging Behind

 Welcome, Spring, 2024!  Strangely, I am sitting inside with several inches of snow on the ground today.  Typical Colorado weather, which is, this time of year, usually anything but typical.  

The stock market has been hitting some record highs as of late.  Unfortunately, the accounts I am managing are not showing that same success.  When the markets go down, these stocks, as a bunch, go way down, too.  But, when the market recovers and makes new highs, it seems these stock go up, but not as wildly as the major markets do.  It makes for an overall picture of these accounts lagging behind everything else.

I'm not worried about it - it's just a commentary on what's going on right now.  My main hope is that the stocks I have, as a whole, will go up and down with the market.  They do, but are matching the market more on the down side, which hasn't happened much lately.  The major markets have been tending to shrug off bad news, and then continue to slowly climb on all the daily news that, while not being fantastic, seems to be cruising along in general.  It still feels like the market is waiting for something to happen.  Could be the elections happening this year.

Obviously, I am talking more about what is going on in the general market than what is happening with my accounts and the AIM part of it.  That's mostly because there has been very little happening with these particular stocks, generally.  Nothing particular positive or negative.  It's been over a year since I've made any transactions stemming from AIM movement.  I've made some decisions to change some stocks out, just because of the general price and movement of certain ones and whether they still do the whole particular account any good or not.  Like, I sold the PAYX out of Sheldon's account because the price had been over $120 a share for a while and not moving very much.  I replaced it with PFE, because I saw that it's price seemed low (under $30) and the potential for it to rise on a larger percentage basis is, IMO, much higher.  Smaller priced stocks, in smaller accounts, also make it easier to do adjustments when they come along.  Allows for more options, since the amounts to be changed usually aren't that much.

I have been doing some more things to generate cash in the cash side of the larger accounts.  Doing a monthly naked put-selling thing in my account (also called writing naked puts) gives me more cash output than just the regular yield, which in trading accounts is usually next to nothing.  Since there is now more than 100 shares of LEVI in my wife's account, I have been doing a monthly covered call on that one.  With one exception of a couple months ago, it hasn't moved fast enough on the upside to make that a bad strategy.