I was a little busy recently, due to many reasons. Thus I did not paid much attention to stock market in the past week, and the big drop in last 6 trading days did not concern me as much (due to distance), another reason is I sold some stocks before and during those days, so I think I am OK.
Why I am selling stocks
Obviously not trying to timing the market. I was the worst market timer, as I ran out of cash in early March (all in stocks at the time, stocks like Berkshire). The main reason I sold stocks is I want to have some liquidity, not that I did not need it in the past, but now liquidity becomes more important as we are expecting our first baby early next year (see my wife’s blog).
How I think about stock market and economy in general
Obviously my opinion does not count much, we already got so many knowledgable people, from President to economist, trying to predict what’s next. Here is my simple take, for what it worth.
1) The healthcare reform bill will pass in some shape of form, with or without public option. Middle class is going to pay for it, not the super rich (they got too many friends in Washington), not the poor.
2) Job market will be terrible for a while. So as consumer spending, housing, etc. But that does not mean the stock market will be terrible.
3) Commercial real estate. I was interested in this recently. I bought some commerical equity REITs (BPO, BEE). And I bought an introductory book on REITs from Amazon last week. I think REITs will be very interesting at this time. No, I don’t think US commercial REITs will repeat the same fate as residential housing market (we all know what happened there).
Thinking baby names
Now we know it’s a girl, we are actively thinkbabynames. We almost settled on a preliminary name. One thing I found out in this process is English name also has its meaning 🙂