1.5 Months In

We've been trading live now for almost 1.5 months and have learned a lot as well as seen most our securities rise a few percentage points in this short time.

When we initially bought our ETFs we assumed they would continue to rise as the market continues to be bullish.  We purchased them with the intention of slowly developing a diversified stock portfolio and we are continuing to research stocks as well as ETF's as we accumulate monthly dues and sell off the securities.  We bought 2 emerging market ETFs and saw those drop the day after we bought them.  ECH which was our Chilean fund fell 12.12% before we voted at our last meeting to sell it and cut our losses.  There was much debate about and we figured we had to set in place some rules as to how much we would let any security fall before we sold it.  This is what we came up with.

Sale of Falling Security
When any security we purchase falls 8% from it's high price it reaches, at any point of our hold on it, we will sell it immediately to cut our losses.  If it continues to fall we have saved ourselves that much money and can then either wait to repurchase on it's upswing, or put that money in another investment.  Here are some examples of what that means.

We buy 'ABC' at $100 and it falls 8% right away, we sell it.
We buy 'ABC' at $100 and it goes up to $105 then falls 8%, we sell it.

We also talked about how we will decide to sell a security on a gain and we figured that every meeting we would review where each investment is at and vote on whether to accumulate more, hold, or sell off.  We hope that if we did all research on any security we purchase it will continue to rise and we should at least be able to make 8% per investment, but in the cases where we reach that 8% mark and think it will continue to rise, we have the option of holding it.

Deciding to cut losses at 8% will protect us from letting it drop farther than 8 which will allow us to put our money into other forms of investments.

Here is our current unrealized gains on our securities:

We have made a good start but will have around $1000 in cash that is still left to invest and should make decisions next Wednesday on what to do with that.

Check back later for more updates!