April 2011 Trading

April has proven to be a rather exceptional month...best to date!  I was able to take profit on a rather large long term holding (NGG) with a large gain as well as several smaller, short term holdings of primarily "premium" purchases with more modest 5-6-7% gains.   As a result, I've turned over the most holdings since mid-2009 as well as being the number one month in terms of realized gain.  I've also seen my unrealized losses eliminated.  I stand poised to match or surpass the April realized gains in May.

I remain at about 65% invested down from a high of over 80%.  I'm happy with this, but have mixed emotions.  On one hand, the market has been moving upward, and I wish to continue to benefit from this.  However, I'm also concerned that the timing is right for a correction.  I'm especially pleased that I was able to liquidate part of my index holdings before such a correction takes place. 

Dividends were modest this month and will be so in May.  If I continue to retain most of my current holdings, June will be the next large dividend month.  But as noted above, there are several holdings that are nearly due for liquidation.  But I'm always happy to trade large capital gains for small dividends.

Sales this month. 

• Colgate Palmolive Corporation - 5.5% gain, "premium" purchase held for a month.
• National Grid plc (ADR) - 12% gain.  Finally, after holding some of these shares for almost a year, I was able to make a sale for a nice gain.
•  Nokia Corp (ADR) - 5.5% gain, bought on bad news at very low price for very small quantity.  Since this purchase was based on bad news, I was pretty quick to get my 5% and get out which took a little more than 1 month.
• Merck & Company, Inc. - 5.5% gain, another "premium" stock held for less than a month.  I actually planned to hold this for a higher gain, but sold on the day before a likely government shutdown when most of the market was dropping like a stone.  Thought other purchase opportunities would be on the horizon, so opted to make my profit, sell out, then hopefully buy into something else in the coming days/weeks.
•  Johnson & Johnson - 7.5% gain, yet another "premium" stock held for about a month and a half.  Received big bump after earning announcement.
• General Mills, Inc - 6.5% gain, "premium" stock held for almost 3 months.
• iShares S&P 500 Index Fund - 5% gain.  First turnover of Index fund holding.  As a small bonus, Firstrade ceased charging a commission of this fund and a few other ETFs just before this sale.  That's another $6.95 in my pocket!
• Intel Corp - 15% gain, sold about 20% of my Intel holdings for nice gain.  These were held within my Roth account and I still have other shares in traditional IRA.  Although I only held for 15 days, this sale generated more income than I would have received if I had the whole account in CDs for over a year.

Current holdings and unrealized gains/losses are as follows. As you can see, there are several holdings at or near the 5% sell threshold.  And Intel is over 14%, so I expect to make several sales in May if this trend holds.  I also added two new holdings in the last few days of April.

The following dividends were collected. 

• SPDR S&P 500 Index Fund
• Sysco Corporation