Quote Originally Posted by Dreadnaught View Post
As you may have noticed, S&P lowered its outlook for US debt. This somewhat refreshing bout of honesty sent stocks downward. Knowing full well there's a chance they will go down further, I decided to populate my new IRA with a few picks.
This is actual total nonsense, but it's not a bad idea to buy stocks on the cheap if you're bullish on the long-term prospects of the economy. Actually, Asian and European markets were down before S&P's news came out, largely due to concerns over Portugal and Spain and some poor global economic indicators. S&P's downgrade wasn't news, and I doubt it had a significant effect on the 'smart money' - Pimco, for example, has been moving out of Treasuries for quite some time now in a very public manner.

Because I'm building an IRA, I'm focusing my choices on stocks that pay decent dividends, are in industries unlikely to go away and are generally market-leaders in their field. Overall this is not a particularly intensive strategy, but it's meant to be a long-term thing. So today I bought:

Exxon
Kraft
JPMorgan
WalMart

I am a bit skeptical on WalMart, because it's not totally clear to me that they can sustain international growth.

Anyone here make any semi-recent moves?
I never really understood the logic of trying to outsmart the market. I just buy a handful of index funds for my IRA based on my asset allocation. My wife's 401(k) is a little more limited in its choices, so we stick to the best (and cheapest) funds of the lot. If you just want to weight towards blue chips, there are decent indices for that as well that have minimal costs and are far better diversified than any personal weighting.

Just my two cents, though. If I was doing it for fun (rather than building a nest egg) I'd probably look at individual choices as well, but I wouldn't go for something like blue chips.

Okay, I just read the rest of the thread. I guess even though it's in an IRA (I assume a Roth?) you're not considering it your retirement savings. In that case, go ahead. I simply don't have enough extra money to consider investing for fun right now. Most of my investment time horizons are either too short to stomach the volatility of stocks (e.g. for a down payment, that sorta thing) or too long to be able to effective beat an index fund with any reliability.