I look at the end of the year as a time to reflect on the year in whole.

Housing is down, Oil is down (who would have thought?), the economy is in free fall. Bellweather stocks like GE, AAPL, MSFT, all down. Why bother investing in the market at all?

Right now, I’m not. I’m not on the sidelines though, I’m just fully vested and in a holding pattern and that’s ok. The stock market moves in cycles and if you’ve played your cards right, even though you might be down on chips, you aren’t out for the count. Remember, nobody ever made money selling for a loss.

Stick to your guns, follow your rules and you will be fine.

That being said, if you aren’t fully vested, don’t try to snipe trades. You are likely to get hacked to pieces especially over the next couple weeks going into the two holidays.

Liquidity is going to dry up as people take vacations to visit family and do some soul searching. Volume is going to be very light in the coming days/weeks as we move into the new year but I am excited about going into 2009. We have a new president that actually seems to care about what is happening to this country fiscally and otherwise. If you want to be buying stocks, as I’ve said before, try to find those accidental high yield stocks that pay good dividends to ride out this churning landscape.

It’s almost Christmas. In fact there are only 6 more days left! Wow. This year sure has gone by fast. And what a year it’s been. A new president elect, the first African American president in the history of the United States will take office in a month. I can’t tell you how happy and proud I am to be part of that historic event. We’re seeing hard times in many places even online and more than ever people are turning to credit to help get them through these difficult times.

Even as credit lending gets tighter and more strict and banks once again adhere to their own rules, we still need to find as many ways to stretch our dollar as we can.

That’s where the American Express Gift Card comes in.

Giving cash is a time honored tradition in many families. I know we always look for the little white envelopes stashed on the Christmas Tree, knowing full well there is some money in there for me to spend to my heart’s desire. But what if you have relatives that are on the other side of the country or in another country entirely?

You don’t want to send cash in the mail but sending gift cards is easy because only the person whose name is on the card can use it. That means you don’t have to worry about fraud and theft.

Check out the American Express Gift Card by clicking the image above. Best of all, this isn’t a department store card. In this economy who knows how long those stores are going to last? With an American Express Gift Card you can spend your money anywhere you want.

Bear Market, Bull Market…who cares? It’s nearly Christmas. Have you finished your shopping? If not, here are some perfect gifts for day traders and investors.

First is Cashflow 101 which is a game created by Robert Kiyosaki that teaches the fundamentals that have made him so wealthy. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s nearly Christmas and I’m in the giving mood. This month I am giving away Kingston Data Traveler 4 GB USB Flash Drive DTI/4GB Thumb drives to every single person that orders either of the following products that I truly believe can help you make money this year and all the rest of your years to follow. After completing either of these orders, simply send me an email with a copy of your receipt and your mailing address to info @ theproficientinvestor.com and I’ll put your 4 GB Kingston Data Traveler 4 drive in the mail, that’s it, simple huh?

Read the rest of this entry »

Any well diversified portfolio will also include to some extent a few dividend paying stocks. Whether in a bull market or a bear market dividend paying stocks boost your portfolio performance and when you reinvest those dividends (DRIP) you are able to take advantage of stocks that have gotten cheaper or just build on a position you already own.

So, how do you find dividend paying stocks? Easy. Just us a stock screener and filter the results to show only dividend and yield stocks. I’ve set up a stock screener on E*Trade looking at stocks that yield between 4-6% and payable between .50 cents and 1.00 a share. Stocks that pay higher dividends are usually a lot more expensive so I wanted to focus on stocks that are affordable to the everyman.

I haven’t done any due diligence into who these companies are or what they do, that’s for you to figure out yourself but again, this is about adding one or two stocks to your portfolio that can pad your account. The other upside of dividend paying stocks is consistent price action. For buy and hold strategies, dividends are key to long term investments.

Here’s 5 that You could consider for your portfolio:

1. Lorillard Inc (LO) – 6.21% yield or $.92 cent/share dividend
2. Consolidated Edison (ED) – 5.98% yield or $.585 cent/share dividend
3. DTE Energy (DTE) – 5.98% yield or $.53 cent/share dividend
4. Boston Properties (BXP) – 5.48% yield or $.68 cent/share dividend
5. VF Corp (VFC) – 4.58% yield or $.59 cent/share dividend

So, just 5 stocks I found screening for specific criteria. I don’t own any of these stocks but this is the kind of thing you want to find in a bear market. All of these stocks are also down way off their highs for the year and otherwise are cheap.

To recap, dividends add to your portfolio and if you reinvest them, you not only boost your position in that stock but get stocks cheaper for essentially nothing since the company is paying you to own their stock.

As a contrarian style investor I don’t like to follow trends necessarilly. I try to look for undervalued stocks that are oversold. By doing this, you can find good deals on stocks that aren’t where they should be. However, we are still in a very strong bear market and finding stocks at the bottom is increasingly difficult.

I try to stick to my guns and sometimes it means trusting that in the long run, solid companies usually come back to previous levels, or at least to levels where you are comfortable taking a loss.

Apple, Inc. (AAPL) is one of these undervalued, oversold stocks. If you want to know why it isn’t performing like it should be you have to understand how hedge funds and institutional investing works. Hedge funds tend to buy many of the same kinds of stocks. That is to say stocks that trade in the same industry. When they need to free up cash they sell off the strongest stocks which can create a wave of selling by individual investors because it easily incites panic selling in an otherwise solid company.

The key thing to remember is these are just pieces of paper. You don’t need to be an Apple fan boy to own the stock and you don’t want to get emotional about being down or up too much. Take profits when you can and if you can, limit your losses quickly. I prefer to buy stocks in steps on the way down and trim off profits on the way up. This way I don’t panic about a stock being down, I just know I’m getting it at a better price.

Wells Fargo (WFC) is also down quite a bit from earlier highs this year and the merger with Wachovia is going smoothly. I know this because I work for Wells. When the stock dipped to $20 earlier in the year I began buying it aggressively in my 401k and I know that long term it is going to previous levels. 2 years ago Wells Fargo split 2 for 1 when it was in the mid 70s. So really, it should be trading back in the 30s within 18 months.

After the speeches yesterday confirming what I have been saying for a year now (that we are in a recession) I am no longer so pessimistic as much of the industry is and there are a lot of ways to make money even in this bear market.

For one, you should be learning how to short sell (sell high, buy low) so you can profit when the market is up or down. I recommend buying Pennystocking by Timothy Sykes if you want to learn how to really make money short selling. The $300 pays for itself in one successful trade. I suggest reading the website and the numerous testimonials. I’ve watched the DVD myself and it’s very thorough, takes you through step by step the exact process Tim uses to make his trades and DVD 1 begins with the very basics from terms you need to know to looking at a few charts.

For the time being there aren’t any stocks that I could say go out and buy but I do like JCG, AAPL, WFC, WMT, F(on bailout news), LMT and DEO. These are all down a lot but I believe will perform well in the next couple months.