Overall a decent day, even though my total gains were only $12.44. Sears Holdings (SHLD) was up $1.58, and Toll Brothers (TOL) was up another 33 cents. My iShares Emerging Markets (EEM) shares wer down 22 cents and my Paxar (PXR) was down 11 cents. Even Blackboard (BBBB) was down three cents.
As expected, I made another $1,000 contribution to my Roth (the final contribution allowable for 2005) and put most of that to work immediately by buying 43 shares of Vanguard's Select Sector Technology SPDR (XLK) for $20.93 apiece. I considered just getting cubes (the NASDAQ 100 ETF, QQQQ), but in fact a lot of the stocks I'd expect to benefit from a tech rally trade on the NYSE or AMEX. XLK consists of 89 tech stocks from all three major exchanges, selected from among the S&P 500. So we'll see if Cramer's tech rally materializes; if it does, I'll be positioned fairly well to benefit from it.
I didn't put the full $1000 contribution into XLC; I kept out about $100 in cash. (I did the same thing when I bought SHLD.) That gives me a total cash position of about $275. As I take profits in some of my other holdings later this year, I'll add the proceeds to the cash position to build another "chunk" so I can have holdings in another stock.
Posted by kindall at July 18, 2005 03:39 PM