Piggy Bank

Shopping Spree

Byadmin

Last night, I had a bit of a panic after Intel dropped horrible earnings. The stock is down 11% today.

I also watched a lot of conflicting opinions on the economy’s future. The stock market has been up all week, suggesting to some that the bottom is in. Others are calling for continuing interest rate hikes into the fall. If the Fed is at 2.5% today, some figure they need to be at 5% for it to have a real effect on inflation. And that’s many more rate hikes to go.

I don’t know what to think. I can’t predict the future, I guess.

Looking over the holdings in my portfolio, I’m happy with all the other picks. There’s nothing that I want to sell. Even the FNGS pick seems to be doing OK as Apple and Amazon came out with good earnings reports. And previously Microsoft and Google also impressed.

Today, I decided to go all-in on ETFs. Holding a basket of stocks is safer than holding just one.

The BMO ETFs make sense to me. There are:

  • BMO LADDERED PREFERRED SHARE INDEX ETF (ZPR)
  • BMO EUROPE HIGH DIVIDEND COVERED CALL ETF (ZWP)
  • BMO CANADIAN HIGH DIVIDEND COVERED CALL ETF (ZWC)
  • BMO COVERED CALL CANADIAN BANKS ETF (ZWB)
  • BMO COVERED CALL UTILITIES ETF (ZWU)

I placed 8.6% of my uninvested cash into those five ETFs. A record shopping spree on a Friday going into a long weekend.

This brings my cash pile down to 51%! It’s exciting to see a significant movement in that number!

You might wonder, what about the rest? I still have 19% roughly in a GIC. The bank recently increased my interest rate on that, and I can see that as safe, secure money that I don’t need to touch any time soon. I might start counting the GIC as invested money. Up til now, it was a place to hold money waiting to be invested. But a 4.3% GIC rate might be a good complement to some of my riskier investments.

I will consider another 10% of my money (invested in a GIC at 4.3%) as being invested. It’s not a great rate of return, but I don’t have to think about it. So my cash pile is now only 41%.

I need to corral the rest of that money (the remaining 32%) out of various accounts into something that earns interest or dividends. Some work to do on that. Do I still want to keep 10% cash on the side for short-term emergencies or peace of mind?

And of course, the game begins again in a week as my August income hits my bank account for another 7% to invest.

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