My IE portfolio experienced an ugly drop in value this past week. Ameritrade lost about 7.5% of it’s value in the last 5 days while Shanda lost a bit over 8%. I think the market way over-reacted to the earnings conference call where the founder disclosed that he and a few other Sr. managers would be selling several million shares in order to diversify their holdings (perfectly reasonable). Shanda is down on no real news, just a rumor that they have been prohibited from marketing IPTV in China (denied by the company). Overall I am down about $1,000 in the past week.

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Received the following this morning in email from HSBC:

We are writing to let you know that beginning May 1, 2006, your HSBCdirect Online Savings Account rate will change to 4.50% APY**. This is one of America’s leading rates and still 8x the national average*, so you can continue to watch your money grow.

With HSBCdirect.com, there are no fees, no minimums, no lock-up period, and your money is FDIC insured.† You can stay confident your money is in the right place and earning the most it possibly can.

Add more money to your HSBCdirect Online Savings Account today at www.hsbcdirect.com and make the most of your savings.

Thanks for growing your money with HSBCdirect.

Your HSBCdirect Customer Service Team

So a drop from their 4.8% promo rate but still not bad. My guess is that they will continue to lag behind the Fed funds rate for the time being which at the moment is 4.75%. The Feds will likely raise the rate again at least once but we’re probably getting closer to the top.

If you work for a large corporation like I do chances are you could be saving some money and not realize it. Many companies, mine included, have group discounts in place with other businesses. For instance, the company I work for has discounts available for Cingular, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, Apple, HP/Compaq and others.

I wasn’t aware of this until yesterday when I was told I had been granted some stock options and was surfing the HR portion of our intranet for the details.  I noticed a ‘Deals’ section and went there, wondering what it was.

Discounts vary but for Verizon the discount was 15% off of monthly rates. This will work out to roughly $15-18 a month on the two lines we have for my wife and I.  Not a ton of money but enough to fund a modest dinner out for the two of us.  (or buy a 1/4 tank of gas…

Check with your HR department, the couple of minutes it will take may pay off.

Last week while the market was going nuts I was attempting to buy back Gasco (GSX).  The Ameritrade (now TD Ameritrade) website was down for a couple of minutes (probably too much load) and I missed my price on the stock.  This caused me to miss out on a small profit from the trade.

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Just so I am sure to write about the bad days as well as the good… Two of my stocks are down in excess of 5% today.

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I’ve updated the RSS feed to use Feedburner. I’ve also redirected the original feed URL to the Feedburner feed URL. If anyone is having any trouble with the new set up, please let me know.

Saw this on Yahoo Finance yesterday. It fits right in with my philosophy of everything in moderation, including moderation…

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After yesterday’s big run-up I sold the 300 shares of (GSX) I had purchased on Monday and netted a nice 9% gain after commissions. My thought was that the stock would fall after such a good day and I was right. This morning it fell more than 4%. After I patted myself on the back and it appeared to bottom and was heading back up I placed an order to buy back my 300 shares at $5.60. It wasn’t meant to be and I didn’t feel like chasing it so I let it go.

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The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.6 percent in March, before seasonal adjustment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The March level of 199.8 (1982-84=100) was 3.4 percent higher than in March 2005.

What this means for I Bond investors

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JLP over at AllFinancialMatters made an interesting post regarding Monte Carlo simulators and their use in retirement planning. I’ve been looking for some more tools like this (I have a couple of Excel spreadheets but they are hard to use…)  Broadly speaking, Montey Carlo methods are useful for modeling systems with many variables (like retirement planning). It is a bit more realistic way of looking at retirement planning than your standard 8% average return per year method. Check out JLP’s post for more links and info.

Per JLP’s suggestion I downloaded the retirement calculator from Pivot Point Advisors and spent some time with it tonight. It belongs in my Financial Information Resources category so here goes…
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