2011 so far . . .

I thought it might be time for me to talk a little about what has been going on in my personal portfolio. 2011 has been pretty average so far, I made some good picks and a bad one. I also got caught with a ill-placed stop loss on a stock that I should have sold in early January after they reported their numbers. But other than that, I'm pretty happy with my portfolio now and how things are progressing. I'm also well diversified in both sectors and in international stocks so hopefully that will help me to avoid all this inflation talk.

Here is what my portfolio looks like now. As you can see I have 4 stocks and some cash waiting for the right buy point. My big loss for the year came from my investment in MIPS. As Tim has discussed on this blog already there were signals there that we should have never gotten into MIPS but we both did and we both took a loss. Sometimes that happens, but I should have instituted some damage control and I should have never taken a 21.69% loss. I just kept hanging on hoping for it to turn around, but it never did. This was just an opportunity to learn from my mistakes. The other loss was from ATVI. I had originally gotten into this stock because I was expecting big 4th Quarter gains in 2010. But I never sold in early January and the stock lost all of it's gains after Blizzard announced that there was going to be no big releases in 2011 and the company announced that they were discontinuing their Guitar Hero series. I'm not sure how I could have seen that coming.

Finally I wanted to talk about diversification. I am finally pretty happy with how diversified my portfolio has become. Last year I spent way too much time heavily invested into technology, then foreign energy and finally consumer products fir the holidays. i lost focus on how a solid portfolio should be well diversified. In the image above you can see how my portfolio looks now. I won't hold onto the cash forever, but I will probably put that last investment into a commodity or into another international equity to ward off inflation as the US dollar drops. We will just have to wait and see. Thanks for reading!