Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Not overvalued, surprisingly

the popular media has hijacked my thinking again...
I succumbed to the concern that the market is over-valued. I started looking at which stocks I could jettison, and rotate into more under-valued holdings.
So I went to my "Fast-Graphs" program and checked them all out. I looked a standard means of valuation, as well as historic valuation. To my surprise, I couldn't find a single holding that is significantly over-valued. Plenty fairly valued, a few under-valued and a few slightly over-valued.
But nothing I would choose to sell or partly sell to rotate into something else.  Writers that I read have suggested some issues are over-valued at the moment. I'm not contemplating purchasing whole positions at these prices. It doesn't change my average purchase price much to continue to reinvest dividends.
I looked at the last 12 months of dividends; except for May, when I changed from  old 401k to IRA and missed most dividend payments in the transition, I earned nearly as much in dividends as I diverted from compensation into the new 401k. So, my diversification is intact, valuation is intact and dividend payments are visibly increasing.  A couple of stocks have "melted down" a bit, but nothing dramatic. The biggest damper has been the two speculative stocks I purchased that are way down, but could still perform well. These represent about  3% of the entire portfolio.

Perhaps it's just hard to believe that my portfolio management has "arrived" at a place where I can sleep well at night and spend less time reading and worrying about it. I can see, however, that as I read and look for new opportunities, I'm not finding many new things that look better than what I already own. I guess that's a sign that I am now in the business of monitoring and adjusting as opposed to building. 

I suppose I should think about how I would feel about a big correction. The correct action is to use that event to buy up more of the same stocks at bargain prices.  However, the emotional reaction is harder to predict. I hope the 2008 experience will prevail and i'll just ride it out and collect those dividends and continue investing and re-investing.  Now it's bed-time....



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