We made the fifteenth through twentieth trades on The Fool Portfolio on Friday, August 11, 1995, doing our annual Beating the Dow switch. This necessitated our selling the two Dow positions that no longer qualified for Beating the Dow, namely American Express and Merck. Parting was such sweet sorrow, as these two returned us 66% and 39% respectively, in the one year we held them. . . not bad, compared to the S&P 500's overall return in that time of 21%. This O'Higgins thing really works! We also dumped Allstate, since it was part of a dwarfed Sears holding and didn't qualify for Beating the Dow. It was a minor loser.
Meantime, we added two new holdings: Chevron and General Electric. They were both Beating the Dow stocks on that day. Further, we added to our existing holding of Sears, which also qualified as one of the Dow Five. (We had a smaller lot of Sears to which we had to add because of the Allstate spinoff.)
We shot all these orders off at market open, to be promptly filled by K. Aufhauser at $27.49ish a pop.
The day ended horribly. With the commissions to pay on SIX trades, and a $3 drop in America Online, The Fool gave up fully 2.41%, vs. a drop of .42% for the S&P 500, and a GAIN of .35% in the NASDAQ.
No you know why we never try to "time" the market, or day trade. :) (Also, see our covered short of BBBY, earlier in the Transaction Archive, for a REAL timing disaster.)
ACTION # STOCK PRICE COMS'N Sold 97 ALL $30 $27.59 Sold 180 AXP $38 3/8 $27.73 Sold 165 MRK $49 7/8 $27.76 PROCEEDS GAIN/LOSS $2,882.41 $553.95 $6,879.77 $1827.33 $8,201.61 $3192.55
Total gain on ALL: 23.79%
Total gain on AXP: 36.17%
Total gain on MRK: 63.74%
ACTION # STOCK PRICE COMS'N COST BASIS Bought 110 CHV $48 3/4 $27.49 $5389.99 Bought 95 GE $57 5/8 $27.49 $5501.87 Bought 60 S $33 7/8 $27.49 $2059.99*
*Keep in mind that we added to our Sears holding, so our overall cost basis then became $4772.65.
