Position Cost Averaging

Hi PCA Fans,

I updated the model portfolio recently and got a barrage of selling. As I expect the market to roll over a bit here and possibly for a while, I am updating the portfolio more often these days.

Today I opened it up and ran the quotes to discover another round of selling.

I will take this round of sell orders as well because I will want the cash on hand to buy back in at lower prices.

Here are the orders for the model portfolio.

In the Indices portfolio I am getting sell orders on SPY, 14 shares for 1,456.28

The QQQQ holding is saying hold and I will.

The IWM says sell 17 shares for 1,003.68.

The DIA is selling 10 shares for a total of 959.70

The Sector Portfolio is selling off a bit as well… here are the orders.

GDX is selling 15 shares for a total of 668.40.

SMH is selling 14 shares for a total of 345.66.

XLE is selling 9 shares for 478.08.

The commodities are all holding and we sold the entire QLD position as it was a bad idea to begin with.

Total portfolio picture is this…

We started with a portfolio value of 472,613 and now we have a portfolio value of 471,728 so we are down a mere 885 bucks or 0.2%.

That is not bad at all when you consider the prices of our initial purchases way back in August of 2008. The market had not really fallen apart yet and the collapse provided the buying opportunities to load up the portfolio.

We’ll see what happens going forward and since we have about a 25% cash reserve available we may get a chance to deploy more cash should we get considerable weakness from here.

With 75% of the portfolio invested, we could also get a chance to lock in more gains if the market pushes higher.

The beauty of the PCA strategy is having a plan in place no matter what.

Until next time…

Buy from the scared… sell to the greedy with PCA.

Hi PCA Fans,

So, I though we were screwed as the markets fell apart after we started this model portfolio near the all time highs in the market.

But, PCA did exactly what it was designed to do and strategically deployed cash into market weakness.

We had weakness… lots of it.

The software went on a buying spree all the way down and loaded the boat on shares on everything we owned.

Eventually we stopped buying as some of the holdings actually depleted the cash reserves for each holding.

We did NOT add additional money to keep buying.

As things turned out… we had one heck of a market rally off the lows and as usual, no one saw that coming either.

We started with 11 holdings at a cost of 357,929.00 and  we have had numerous trades generated by the software.

Now we have only 10 holdings as I sold all of QLD. and took a 25% loss on the whole deal.

All told we are down about 1.4% on this whole portfolio and that is not too bad considering what people went through since we started this model portfolio back in August of 2008.

Hi PCA Fans,

I am selling all of the QLD. It was stupid of me to even add a leveraged ETF to this portfolio.

Leveraged ETFs are a screw job the longer you hold them.

You get churned out of profits and there are better places to be.

Sold out. Lost 4,111.00 or 25% on this one… my bad.

Lesson learned.

Class dismissed.

Hi PCA Fans,

Here is a sell on SLV.

61 shares for 965.02.

Now we have 53.7% shares and 46.3% cash.

3 buys and 2 sells have us up 19.2%

Hi PCA Fans,

I am selling 11 shares of XLE for 571.67.

We are now sitting at 87.3% shares and 12.7% cash on this one.

14 buys and 1 sell have us down by 10.6%

Another wait and see holding.