Joe and Mary's portfolio

Mary and I have been pretty good about putting money into our Roth IRAs for the last 5 years. I pick all the stocks to invest in. For the most part, my strategy is to pick stocks that will appreciate to put into my own IRA, and to pick dogs that do nothing or go down to put into Mary's.

Really, it's not supposed to be that way, but that's how it's worked out. My IRA is nearly double hers.

We don't have any stocks to speak of outside our IRAs, because we sold them all to buy Three Meadows. (As it turns out, late 2000 was a pretty good time to have dumped my tech-heavy portfolio.)

Here are all the stocks we own:

Central European Distributors (CEDC): 225 shares owned since 9/02.
This is a Polish booze company with excellent growth and profits. I've been selling off hunks of it as the price went up (I started with 1000 shares pre-split) because I get nervous when too high a percentage of my portfolio is in a single stock. This has appreciated so much over the past year that I'm starting to think about getting rid of the last of it. Maybe if and when it rises to 30 -- I think it's worth 28.

Quantum DSS (DSS): 227 shares, owned since 1998
Years ago I used to own a lot of Quantum hard drive stock, on the theory that TiVos and XBoxes would be just the tip of the iceberg on devices that needed little hard drives, but those never really took off, and my other expected applications (especially mini-cameras) never happened, either. Quantum split off DSS and merged with Maxtor, and somehow I overlooked this DSS portion and never sold it, and it's just dropped and dropped. I still don't know why I'm holding it. I guess at 4 it's not worth selling.

Intel (INTC): 281 shares, owned since 6/02
This is an example of the boring stocks I pick for Mary's IRA. I expect long-term growth from this bellwether, so I picked some up when it seemed really low.

Sara Lee (SLE): 410 shares, owned since 4/03
Another boring stock from a big diversified company. Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee!

RMI Titanium (RTI): 81 shares, owned since 1998
At the time, this looked like a company with excellent growth and profits, though since then it has proven to have negative growth. Still, it's profitable (as a company, not a stock), so I don't feel too bad about it. I still think it will go up. Some day.

Maxtor (MXO): 94 shares, owned since 1998
Again, this is my "hard drives are going to keep booming" pick. A leftover. I'm not sure why I'm holding it still. I guess I still think that hard drives are heavily underutilized in the world -- though Maxtor doesn't seem to have any imagination any more.

Cash: about $47,000
This is in IRAs, so we really can't touch it for another 30 years or so. I definitely wish it was invested, but I'm having trouble finding stocks I want to buy.

When I do find a company I'd like to own, I have a lame tendency to put in a limit order at about 1% below the current price, on the theory that it's likely to dip below that in natural wavering over the next couple of days. I like to think this leads to me getting a pretty good price on it.

Unfortunately, several of my recent picks have gone only up since I picked them, never giving me a chance to buy. A prime example was Equinix (EQIX) last month, which I tried to buy at $3.20 when it was at $3.25. Now it's around $8. Oops!

Another dumb thing I tend to do is sell out on a company too early. A prime example of that was ATS Medical (ATSI), a company that makes artificial heart valves. I bought at $0.33, sold at $0.57 (happily!). Now it's $2.61. Oops! I wish I'd only sold half, every time it doubled, like I did with CEDC.

I like obscure little companies with low debt and good profits. I don't like popular, well-known companies with poor profits or prospects.

If anybody has favorite companies, I'd love to hear about them.

Filed Wed - June 4, 2003, 11:11 AM in

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