1stmilliondollar.net

A financial journey to our first million dollar

Archive for February, 2010

Stocks with More than 10% Year Dividend Yield

February 22nd, 2010

If you believe that we’ll be in a range-bound market for some time, you might be looking for stocks that has high dividend yield. We posted a couple of stocks recommendation from Dr. Mark Skousen in our previous posting. Now, we’ll post stocks recommendation from Bryan Perry, editor of Cash Machine.

As always, we remind you to consult your financial advisor before making any decision. Some of Bryan’s recommendations are actually closed-end funds. Note that stocks with high dividend yield do not guarantee that they cannot go down in price. They may also cut their dividends at any time.

Links

1 comment »

Posted in Stock Picks

Tags: AGNC BOE bryan perry BX cash CIM dividend IRR JGT JNK LINE machine NMM OTT stock

How Does Our Portfolio Look Like?

February 22nd, 2010

So far, we’ve been talking about our stock picks (see also here), but we never disclosed our portfolio. Now, we’re going to disclose our real portfolio.

First of all, we use a couple of different strategies in our portfolio. For example, we use dollar-cost averaging in our retirement account. We use a combination of fundamental and technical analysis in our short-term trading account. Having said that, we try to keep our portfolio as simple as possible.

How does our portfolio look like?

15% US index
15% Canadian index
15% Emerging market index
30% fixed-income, which includes government bonds, corporate bonds and preferred shares.
5% REIT
20% speculative stocks, long-term options and currency speculation

As we mentioned in our previous posting, we use mostly ETF and index mutual funds (we always prefer “no-load” mutual funds). We’ll discuss about which ETF/mutual funds issuers that we use in future posting.

(Picture is from stock.xchng.)

3 comments »

Posted in Portfolio

Tags: bonds canada emerging market fixed income index Portfolio preferred shares reit us

Bill Gates on TED: Innovating to Zero!

February 21st, 2010

It’s Sunday…. and it’s time for “Just for Fun”. We’ll be trying to publish a posting in “Just for Fun” category every Sunday.

Last week, Bill Gates gave speech at TED. His topic this time is about zero-emission energy sources. He mentioned that we needs break-through technology.

What’s his idea? He’s talking about Terrapower, another type of nuclear reactor. Instead of burning uranium-235, which makes less than 1% of natural uranium, this reactor burns uranium-238, which makes 99% of natural uranium. He also said that we can use all the leftover waste from today’s reactors as fuel.

According to Wikipedia, one kilogram of uranium-235 can produce about 80 trillion joules of energy, which is as much energy as 3000 tonnes of coal. What is more interesting, Bill showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders in Kentucky. This waste, which is full of uranium-238, can be “re-used” by Terrapower as source of energy. It should be able to supply the US energy needs for 200 years. Wow….

I’m not an expert on nuclear engineering, but it sounds really cool to me. What I don’t understand is why our current reactor doesn’t use Uranium-238 yet. Nuclear power plant has been around for more than 5 decades. Weren’t there any scientists or engineers thinking about the idea?