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Old 08-01-2015, 02:48 PM   #41
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It used to be Amazon, bought for $35ish in 2000/2001, but finally decided to take some profits earlier this year when our ROI got to the 1100% mark.

(Kept a few shares, though, just for the fun of it)
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Old 08-01-2015, 03:11 PM   #42
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Stock-MDU. Bot in 1981 to take advantage of tax break for reinvested dividends. Kept doing it after tax break expired. Haven't sold cuz my tax bracket won't drop for another year, and it's less than 5% of total portfolio. Now take dividends in cash.

Fund-IVWAX. About 6% of portfolio. I like their objective of lower volatility. Execution by managers has been credible.


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Old 08-01-2015, 03:31 PM   #43
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Amazing that everyone made an excellent choice in their biggest individual stock holding and nobody listed Radio Shack as their largest holding.

Are we all just excellent stock pickers? Makes me wonder why we index...
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Old 08-01-2015, 03:47 PM   #44
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Originally Posted by Fermion View Post
Amazing that everyone made an excellent choice in their biggest individual stock holding and nobody listed Radio Shack as their largest holding.

Are we all just excellent stock pickers? Makes me wonder why we index...
My second largest position is CVX and I paid $109/share. Not all good picks.
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Old 08-01-2015, 05:02 PM   #45
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Not exactly sure...it used to be IBM but since it's off it's highs it might not be. I bought it years ago (I think my post split pps is $5-6 ). In terms of numbers of shares it's either TXN since I used to work for them and bought stock with an ESPP or CY my last company which I had RSU from.

Prior to moving my TI 401K to my Spansion (now CY) one it was TXN since I also has about 7% of that 401K in TXN stock but I cashed that out in order to move it over
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Old 08-02-2015, 04:02 AM   #46
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Amazing that everyone made an excellent choice in their biggest individual stock holding and nobody listed Radio Shack as their largest holding.

Are we all just excellent stock pickers? Makes me wonder why we index...
I'm a common sense stock picker. I've always had my core of 10 to 15 blue chip stocks and 1 or 2 speculative stocks. I'm almost all in the stock market with individual stocks in all our accounts (taxable and non-taxable). Granted I'm younger than some of the people on this forum and maybe I'll change my asset allocation when I'm older. For now, I enjoy the stock market.
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Old 08-02-2015, 04:49 AM   #47
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Are we all just excellent stock pickers? Makes me wonder why we index...
Survivorship bias?

If a stock goes up x2 it takes up a bigger portion of the total.

Arcelormittal was my second biggest buy, went down with 30% in the last three years. So by no means my biggest holding anymore
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Old 08-02-2015, 05:01 AM   #48
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Facebook, representing 3.7% of my total stock investments (only 1.55% of our total investable net worth). Bought it cheap after the IPO and really just holding it as a longterm potential big winner (hopefully?).
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Old 08-02-2015, 06:52 AM   #49
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I have just invested in RY and NA and topped up TD last Tuesday. Partly this is because of your success with sticking to the knitting. Incidentally they are all up.
200 TD at 51.37 up 2.73%
345 NA at 44.29 up 5.66%
370 RY at 73.81 up 3.32%
to fill up $21000 in TFSAs and $27000 in RESP. TD seems to be the laggard.

But I do have the feeling it was too soon...is there anything we do not know about at this point?
Greece old news
China old news
Oil patch old news
US Politics probably positive for Canada

Of course I now have a buffer for some bad news...
Looks like this might be very good timing. I think the banks were oversold at those levels. More bad news, maybe, but I'm more inclined to think the U.S. results especially for TD will be strong when they release Q3 on Aug 27. As you know I haven't bought a bank share since the crises, but if I was buying this would have been a good time I think. 4% div yield and very low payouts create a pretty good support floor in this envireonment as well. Cheers
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Old 08-02-2015, 07:08 AM   #50
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Apple. We've owned it since the 90s. Has grown to around 5% of net worth, I think, finally surpassing the leftovers from my old company stock.
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Old 08-02-2015, 07:12 AM   #51
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I remember the Microsoft IPO in 1986 at $21 a share. Kicking myself now. Would probably be worth hundreds of thousands by now.

Biggest stock PFF, 6% divs are nice.
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Old 08-02-2015, 07:31 AM   #52
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Using Stock Intersect CSG (reit) 3.13%
SO 1.14%
AAPL .96%
EXC .61%
MSFT .45%


CSG is my dry powder and pays a decent div. I sold a little over half of what I previously had. These are of my entire portfolio - IRA/Roth/Taxable.
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Old 08-02-2015, 11:14 AM   #53
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Pfizer, J&J and P&G in that order
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Old 08-02-2015, 11:51 AM   #54
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Hasbro. And it's kind of a funny story.

For about a year after I early retired, I had a rule that if I was ever contacted for a job, even though I was retired, I would at least take the time to look into it, maybe even go for an interview, on the premise that it would not hurt to at least consider it, I had plenty of free time, and who knows maybe the job would be good enough that I might be willing to "un-retire" for a while.

So a head hunter called me out of the blue about a job at Hasbro. The initial phone screen with the head hunter led to several phone interviews with the HR people at Hasbro. The HR people seemed to be pretty impressed with me so they scheduled a phone interview for me with the hiring manager, the VP of marketing. The HR people assured me that this interview was very urgent, so I agreed to do it even though I would have to block off time during some fun summer travel I had scheduled with my GF. Well, my GF and I had to reschedule our travel a little bit so we could accommodate this phone interview. Not a big deal but still kind of a nuisance.

So I called the VP of Hasbro at the appointed time, only to discover that he was not in the office. In fact, he was also traveling - on vacation in the UK for a week! I guess, the HR people thought he would be willing to take time out of his travel to conduct the interview while on his vacation overseas. However, after about an hour waiting for their HR people to try to reach him on his vacation to see if he would take my call (that they had arranged), they came on the line and told me that sorry, they could not reach him, but they would get back to me when he got back the states to re-schedule the phone interview with him.

Of course, I never heard from them again.

Oh well, given their awful organization and horrible treatment over a phone interview, I knew I was better off.

The good news is that in my company research ahead of the phone interview, I determined that Hasbro stock looked undervalued and maybe a pretty good buy. So I bought some. And now that Hasbro stock is up over 140% since I bought it only 3 years ago.
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Old 08-02-2015, 03:28 PM   #55
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If both shares and vested calls net of strike are included, that would be my current employer's stock. Three reasons:
1. restricted stock unit grants awarded annually
2. non-qualified stock options (one-time deal for me, annual top-ups are above my pay grade)
3. employee stock purchase plan gives a small discount off the lower end of the window, so I've been maxing it out

At 4% of the total it shouldn't be a factor in OMY, but I admit it would suck royally now had I bailed at YE2012 when the calls were underwater and only a few percent had vested. With my luck they'd be screaming higher now like the ride Qualcomm caught in the late 1990s (that was ~30x in five years IIRC) and I'd be climbing the walls at Bellevue. Unfortunately for my co-workers, I decided to not let them get filthy rich without me, I stayed on so it's guaranteed not to happen. Still I'm surprised (and grateful) these are mildly green. Lots of gray head engineers around me I know could handle ER financially, but still working-- because we don't completely own our future.
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Old 08-02-2015, 04:45 PM   #56
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Our biggest holding is CVX, at about 10% of our total. (It was about 15% until recently.)

The reason is that it's held in my wife's 401K, waiting to take advantage of Net Unrealized Appreciation rules. We've more than lost any tax savings we might have had, though the dividend is still good..
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Old 08-02-2015, 10:09 PM   #57
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EXAS. Medical test for colon cancer through DNA approved by the FDA last fall. Had several friends die from it because they like most in the world, never had a colonoscopy. This is almost as good as one and is taken every three years. Like many bio stocks, this is heavily shorted.
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Old 08-02-2015, 10:48 PM   #58
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BRK about 25%
Reason is because its like having a mutual fund that works for free.
Its super tax efficient, as it causes zero tax effect until you decide to sell some.

I'll also admit, its because I cannot think up any better rewarding with less risk things for large chunks of money.
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Old 08-03-2015, 07:23 AM   #59
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My biggest individual holding is Cedar Fair (FUN), the company that owns Cedar Point, Kings Dominion, Canada's Wonderland, and a bunch of other amusement parks. I initially bought a bunch around 2009, I think. It was going for around $10 per share, and was paying out 25 cents per quarter, so I figured at 10%, I'd take my chances.

FUN is also listed as an MLP, so distributions aren't subject to federal taxes, although I think they do get hit with state and local.

Well, soon after I bought it, it dropped down to around $6-7 per share, so I took a chance and bought some more. Then, not long after that, damn if the distributions didn't dry up! But, the price started going back up. As it went up, I'd sell a bit off, and then buy a bit back on the dips. Eventually the distributions started again, and kept growing year after year. At the end of 2014, it started paying 75 cents per quarter, and with luck will go up again in December of this year.

The share price is also up to around $52-53 I think. It represents about 5.5% of my total investible assets.
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Old 08-03-2015, 07:44 AM   #60
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On a pure STOCK analysis, Verizon VZ is about 6.4% measured against total portfolio.
Within the brokerage it is 22% measured against the total brokerage amount.

I don't have a tool that can do a stock intersection, but adding in VZ held in mutual funds, it is probably at least 7.5%.

Neat risk tool here:
Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) Risk Assessment Tool - Nasdaq.com
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