I submitted my recent post on my investment in QLTI to this week’s Festival of Stocks, partly in an attempt to get back into investing (and particularly value investing) resources in the blogosphere.

I found a couple of interesting articles, one an analysis at Old School Value on Warren Buffett’s Stock picks (Berkshire recently released its Q2 holdings) that will take me some time to go through, and another on leveraged ETFs, an interesting area I didn’t know much about (though truthfully, I would probably shy away from investing in these given my style).

The latter article is a bit annoying in that it requires you to register for free before you can read the entire post, but if you’ve been looking into investing in leveraged ETFs, it’s probably worth a read first. There are also some other articles highlighting specific stocks, the Indian market, and other areas related to stocks and investing should these fit your interests.

Back in April, I wrote about my investment in QLTI, which was the first stock I ever found that met all of Benjamin Graham’s criteria. I bought 1200 shares at $2.13 in an IRA account despite a runup of nearly 30% between the day I found the stock and the day I bought it, thanks to not having had sufficient time to research it enough before getting comfortable enough to invest in it.

At the risk of jinxing myself, QLTI closed today at $4.01, or 88% higher than my purchase price, excluding transactions costs. Truth be told, I had largely ignored it until this week when I noticed its performance.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided to follow George’s footsteps over at Fat Pitch Financials and actively manage the investments in my son’s Coverdell account. Coverdell accounts are great because you can open one up and invest the money much more freely than in a 529 plan, they’re tax advantaged, and because their funds can be applied to secondary school rather than just college and graduate school. However, the maximum contribution that can be made to a beneficiary each year and across all sources is only $2K, and contributions can only be made until the beneficiary reaches 18 years of age.

This means I need to try to grow the money in the account as much as possible while limiting any downside. Enter special situations investing, which turns out to be a great way to invest smaller amounts of money with pretty big returns. Of course, no investment is risk-free, but I’m hoping that by choosing workouts wisely, I’ll be able to get a better return on the account than if I bought a few odd-lot shares of an ETF or mutual fund.
Read the rest of this entry »

Are you one of those people who’s ever pined for a scientific calculator you had in the past? I’m dating myself (among other things) here, but I attended high school before the epoch of graphing TI calculators but after slide rules (thankfully)!

Somewhere between AP calculus, college, and many moves between states after graduation, I lost my much loved Casio and couldn’t for the life of me remember the model. At the time, it was amazing (to me at least) for its ability to be programmable, iterate and solve equations, deal with radians…you get the idea.

Enter MyCalcDB, which appears to be an exhaustive database of calculators of all kinds last updated on July 17th of this year. After narrowing down the dates and manufacturer to Casio, I found my calculator within minutes. It even shows thumbnails of each calculator where available.

So, for the tiny portion of readers who are as nerdy as I am and long for things like out-of-date scientific calculators, I thought I’d share this resource :)