March 2011 Trading

March was another decent month.  Gains were above average, but alas, the streak is over.  For the last six months, I was able to improve on the previous years monthly gain, but I did not extend this streak into March.  I could have artificially extended the streak by doing some profit taking on NGG which is a relatively large holding and currently has unrealized gains exceeding 10%.  But I thought there were a few more dollars to squeezed out, so I elected to continue holding this stock.  We'll see if this proved to be a wise decision.

This month was also notable because of the significant increase in percent invested.  During the terrible tragedy in Japan, I made significant efforts to buy into the down market.  I bought into several individual stocks and finally bought into the oft-discussed index EFTs.  So I sit at 81.3% invested at the end of the month.

Sales this month.  The "premium" purchases continue to add to the gains:

• Abbott Laboratories - 7% gain, "premium" purchase only held for a month.
• Harris Corporation - 8.5% gain, "premium" stock turned around in only 12 days. 

Current holdings and unrealized gains/losses are as follows. Note six new holdings. Also note that National Grid, Entergy, Colgate Palmolive and Merck all were over the 5% threshold at some point in March.  So I'm not always aggressive about profit taking.  I think all were wise decisions except perhaps Entergy which has nuclear exposure which was obviously impacted by the situation in Japan.

The following dividends were collected.  In dollar terms, this is the biggest dividend month to date.

• Entergy Corporation
• FirstEnergy Corp
• Exelon Corporation
• Life Partners Holding, Inc
• iShares S&P 500 Index Fund