You may have noticed I didn’t do much posting today, but there really wasn’t much to report. Plus I was comfortable letting the portfolio ride today, and I think the results speak for themselves:

AGQ: 6.44 to $186.26 (3.58%, 28.99% overall)–bought at $144.40
ICLK: -0.04 to $5.64 (-0.70%, 6.21% overall)–bought at $5.31
INTC: -0.39 to $21.47 (-1.78%, 15.93% overall)–bought at $18.52
JUBAX: NA to $11.00 (NA%, 8.16% overall)–bought at $10.17
NYX: 0.00 to $37.00 (0.00%, 1.65% overall)–bought at $36.40
SLW: 2.04 to $42.67 (5.02%, 18.53% overall)–bought at $36.00
UBC: 0.07 to $22.32 (0.31%, -0.80% overall)–bought at $22.50
VZ: 0.95 to $36.92 (2.64%, 0.87% overall)–bought at $36.60

OVERALL: +1.17%

While that is a great way to end the month, my gut feeling is the rest of the week will be even better. See you in March!

1. I found it humorous that Bernie Madoff called the government a ponzi scheme, and thought the Dodd-Frank bill was a “joke”. As I’ve been saying since before they passed the bill, all Dodd-Frank did was to further insulate our already too big to fail banks. If you don’t believe that to be the case, just follow the money, and look at who the top campaign contributors were in the last two elections: You’ll see a lot of names like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

2. It seems that fee-based registered investment advisors (RIA) have replaced stockbrokers for many investors. While this is quite logical for many investors who don’t have the time or knowledge to invest their own money, I find it intriguing that this trend has caused Vanguard to surpass Fidelity in assets handled, mostly due to Vanguard’s ultra-cheap ETFs. While I don’t have any issues with Vanguard’s ETFs, most of them are, to put it bluntly, rather vanilla. The fact that RIA’s like to invest there shows how vanilla most of them are, as RIA’s are trying to avoid as much investment risk as possible. If you don’t mind paying someone to make sure you don’t lose any money, then RIA’s are for you…

3. Wall Street isn’t worried about a potential U.S. government shutdown. At least we know they won’t be spending money if they shut down…

4. Speaking of spending money, economists are more worried about the U.S. budget deficit than anything else, including unemployment. Of course, all those economists are employed…

5. On the topic of economics (boy do I have the bridges going today!), we have a big economic week ahead:

Monday: January Personal Income and Spending, January PCE Core Prices
Tuesday: Auto and Truck Sales
Wednesday: February Challenger Job Cuts, February ADP Employment Change, Fed’s Beige Book
Thursday: Productivity and Labor Costs (Revised for the 4th quarter 2010)
Friday: February Payrolls, February Unemployment Rate

6. Gold and silver are up in early spot trading today. Expect that to continue as the dollar is tanking right now. There is a lot of Media chatter about the dollar no longer being the “safe haven” play. Be careful sitting on large cash positions. The time to be in cash is right before a crash. Any other time, and you are just sitting on a losing investment, as inflation eats away the value of your cash holdings.

I finished the day up 2%, which is a nice reward for doing my taxes!

Speaking of taxes, here is a rather cool version of the Beatles’ song “Taxman”, by Junior Parker:

Enjoy your open thread folks, and I’ll see you next week!

I have set my sell limit price on NYSE Euronext (NYX) at $39.00. I may lower it if we still don’t get any news on a buyout from Nasdaq, or any other exchange, next week.

Since it is only a month and a half away from April 15th (the only date in the U.S. that induces cringing), and since I am doing my taxes today, it is TAX DAY on ETS!

Here is the thread for all tax questions or tips you may have.

This year, I have decided to try Tax Act to prepare my taxes. As I go along, I will add some comments about my experience.

In the past, I have used both Turbo Tax and H&R Block’s tax software, as well as Turbo Tax’s online filing. (What can I say? I’m a tax software slut.) So I have plenty of experience with various tax preparation methods. I chose Tax Act this year because, well, it’s cheap! Although I have preferred Turbo Tax in the past, have you seen their prices lately?  If you buy the software at a store, plan to shell out $70+. The online fees aren’t much better. Tax Act is $14.95-17.95 (depending on which addition you get). At that price, it’s worth trying. Did I mention I’m cheap?

Anyway, time for me to start, although I’ve enjoyed the excuse for procrastination. Blogging has other benefits too…

1. Sorry for the delay in today’s notes. I only had time yesterday afternoon to get out my summary. i had to take my wife out to dinner last night, and then we went shopping. By the time I got home, I was exhausted! Anyway, when I got up this morning, it took awhile for me to go through all the comments from yesterday afternoon and last night, so if you left me a question, it’s answered now. Now on to today…

2. Upon further review (yes, I miss football)…the U.S. economy only grew by 2.8% in the 4th quarter of 2010, according to the second estimate of the GDP out this morning. In spite of this, stock futures are still up this morning, and seem to be going up higher before the open, even after this news. While this news is backward-looking, I wonder if the markets aren’t viewing this as, “The economy still stinks, the Federal Reserve keeps pumping…” While this is good for our stock investments, make no mistake, the stock market is an asset bubble in the making. The Federal Reserve is getting stuck in an economic beast of their own making: As long as they continue the stimulus, the markets will keep going up; as soon as the Fed stops, the markets will crash, potentially putting the U.S. economy back into another recession. Enjoy the bull market while you can, because it won’t last forever. 

3. I find it humorous that the U.S. government tries to provide incentives to the solar industry for people to install solar panels on their rooves, while local government building regulations add to the cost. The “money” quote from CNBC:

Current installed costs for solar photovoltaic, PV, systems-the typical flat solar panels seen on rooftops-is $5.50/watt in the U.S., but $3.50/watt in Germany.

If you need an example of how the U.S. is over-regulated, this is a great example. We can’t even do something right without tripping over our own regulations.

4. Oil is down, precious metals are up. As the Lone Ranger used to say, “Hiyo Silver!”

After the “better than the markets” days I have been having this week, the markets got their revenge on me today, when silver dropped over 4%.

AGQ: -16.56 to $165.98 (-9.07%, 14.94% overall)–bought at $144.40
ICLK: 0.27 to $5.82 (4.86%, 9.60% overall)–bought at $5.31
INTC: 0.14 to $21.29 (0.66%, 14.96% overall)–bought at $18.52
JUBAX: NA to $10.85 (NA%, 6.69% overall)–bought at $10.17
NYX: 0.22 to $37.02 (0.60%, 1.70% overall)–bought at $36.40
SLW: -2.29 to $38.63 (-5.60%, 7.31% overall)–bought at $36.00
UBC: 0.05 to $22.42 (0.22%, -0.36% overall)–bought at $22.50
VZ: -0.23 to $35.58 (-0.64%, -2.79% overall)–bought at $36.60

OVERALL: -1.70%

A couple of questions came up in the comments about Banco Santander’s (STD) dividend. Whenever you look at dividends, it is always necessary to look at the dividend history, for several reasons:

1. How often do they pay?
2. How much have they paid recently? (looking for trends up or down in their dividend payments)

One of the really nice benefits of having a Vanguard account is their dividend tool, which shows dividends paid for the last 3-4 years. In the case of Santander, their dividends look like this:

Ex-Dividend Date/Dividend Amount
1/12/11 $0.1595
10/12/10 $0.1649
7/28/10 $0.1769
4/28/10 $0.2922
1/27/10 $0.1713
10/13/09 $0.1772
7/29/09 $0.1936
4/28/09 $0.3413
1/28/09 $0.1568
12/2/08 $0.1840
10/29/08 $0.1710
7/29/08 $0.2099
4/28/08 $0.4339

As you can see, STD is all over the place with their dividend payments, so it could be 4% annualized one quarter, and 6% annualized the next quarter, or higher. For example, when STD paid it’s dividend in April 2010, it was a 10% annualized yield. On the other hand, their dividend last month was only a 5.8% annualized yield (both of these examples are based on the price at the time they were paid).

With Santander, we never know exactly how much we will get, but they still offer one of the most generous dividends around, even in their “cheap” quarters.

As I mentioned in my daily notes, it is starting to look like Spain may have finally turned a corner on their economic problems (mind you, some of them will probably never be solved, but at least their debt doesn’t look like loaning money to your cousin with a gambling problem anymore). With the extraction of Motorola from my portfolio, that means it is time to turn an eye towards the only bank in the world that might actually grow, and that is Banco Santander (STD).

Even putting aside growth, and the fact they seem to have subsidiaries in every continent except Antarctica (although I hear there are preliminary talks with some penguins), what makes STD so very sweet is their 6% quarterly dividend.

I have put in a limit buy order for STD at $11.75, although I will gladly wait for this one. If it doesn’t go today, I am not chasing it.

You may ask, why a bank? Because I needed to diversify my portfolio a bit more, and I wanted a good dividend play outside of the tech sector.

After reading several reviews (here is a good summary) of Motorola Mobility’s new Xoom tablet, I came to a conclusion: Motorola doesn’t know how to compete.

The key to me was this line from the Daily Tech review:

“…Walt Mossberg also raises a valid issue, that the Xoom, unlike some other Android devices has a non-replaceable battery. That means that power users who might hope to bring an extra battery with them on a long plane ride, etc. are out of luck.”

What…were…they…thinking?! How do you sell a mobile device without replaceable batteries? I recognize that an occasional flaw will make it through the design process (see the last iPhone’s antenna problems for an example), but the decision to not use replaceable batteries is intentional. And dumb. My guess is they had a problem with Xoom’s power usage, and they just couldn’t get it to work long enough with replaceable batteries.

While I am sure the Xoom will find a niche, because it does have enough going for it to sell some, it won’t reach the iPad’s mass popularity. With other companies coming out with tablet competitors, expect Xoom to be an afterthought very quickly, especially with a non-competitive price of $800.

As for MMI, they still make good smartphones. I imagine one of their Droid phones with someone else’s Honeycomb/Droid tablet might make a good combination.

I have sold MMI at $29.70.

The final line:
MMI: -0.07 today, -0.65 overall to $29.70 (-0.24%, -2.14% overall)–bought at $30.35