I’m happy to be hosting the 28th installment of the Carnival of Investing this week. There are nearly 30 posts in this week’s edition and while I haven’t read them all yet, the ones I have appear to be pretty well written.

Special thanks to Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog for keeping the Carnival going. Next week’s host will be Mighty Bargain Hunter.

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Still getting pummeled by the market but I’ve strengthened my position somewhat. I can’t say we’re at a bottom, I think we’ll continue to have a volatile market until the end of the month when the Fed likely raises rates. The comments made after that will determine the overall direction for the market.

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I had Friday off and am home today as well.  Friday I couldn’t help but watch the markets on and off all day.  I resisted the urge to become a day trader (because I don’t know enough about what I am doing) and only made one trade.

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Friday was the last day to trade options expiring in February. Since I had some in my portfolio it’s a good time for an update to the experiment.

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Due to the $2,500 additional deposit and the fact that I’ll be adding more money to my brokerage account instead of being able to contribute to my 401K I’ve decided to rename my $5000 Experiment to ‘Investment Experiment’. Same concept, just more money will be flowing in.

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Time for an update…

As of Friday my positions have not changed from my previous post. I noticed that Jonathan @ mymoneyblog.com was using open portfolio to track his investments. I went ahead and set up an account as well. From here on, you can see the day to day performance of my portfolio here: http://www.openportfolios.com/Members/mypfblog/myplaymoney

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I love stocks. The idea that my money can work so hard for me (with some work on my end) just tickles me to no end.

As I’ve written about in the past, I’ve recently begun to fund my ‘play money’ account again after a long absense. By play money I mean money that I can afford to lose. This doesn’t mean I want to lose it or am willing to gamble it away on some speculative play. Certainly, there will be trades that go against me but hopefully, if I’ve done my homework, I’ll be right more than I’m wrong.

Which brings me to the $5000 experiment…

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The end of the year is approaching and its time to take a look at our investment holdings.

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I have (had) a fair amount of cash sitting at Virtualbank. Part of it is earmarked for paying off my 0% credit card balance in January. The rest is savings. I’ve been using it to purchase I Bonds for a month now and plan to continue on that path at least until the new rates are announced in May of 2006. Virtualbank is paying 3.55% which by today’s standards kind of sucks…

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Before I continue, I am not a financial professional, nor do I pretend to be. So please, do your own due diligence before you invest in, or try anything I mention in this blog… m’kay?

Anyway, in 1995 I had just moved out to Michigan at the request of my company’s largest investor. He wanted me to help organize a merger between us and another small company he had a stake in. The merger ultimately fell apart, but that is another story… Anyway, sharing office space with this other company was a part-time stock trader named Glen. He was an interesting character but always seemed to find good stock ideas. It was Glen who first taught me what options were (I vaguely remember my dad playing with them back in the 80’s but I don’t think it ever worked out for him.)

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