It’s been a while. I’m a few months older and a couple dollars closer to my goals. I’ve done a lot more buying and selling this year, simply because I can, but I haven’t been the most diligent with documenting my journey. Here’s my brief effort to catch up.

After March, I was free to participate in my old stock market activities, but it’s taken a while to get back into the swing of things. I’m slowly learning how to reorganize my life now that it includes a different set of priorities. At the top of my list are God, my husband, and my career, in that order. Then there’s Diaper Duty, Inc, researching new technology for my day job, and analyzing stocks to buy. Then there’s the issue of trying to find time to work out. People keep saying I should work out in the morning just to ensure I do it, but I wake up anytime between 2:30 and 5:30 on a regular basis just to get to work. I wanted to do lunch workouts, but there are days I don’t get a real lunch because someone always has an issue that HAS to get fixed at THAT exact moment. Clearly finding time for a quick, fun workout is a challenge and I feel some kind of way about it…but this blog is about investing. If you’re reading this, you’re probably more interested in that anyway.

As far as investing is concerned, I’ve probably incorporated more speculative stocks in my portfolio in 2018 than ever before. And by speculative stocks, I mean stocks that don’t have at least 3-5 years of history to draw on to reference. I chose more speculative stocks because I’m looking for something to drive growth as Amazon and Apple start to look more like value plays in my portfolio. Those two companies are teetering the line of being trillion dollar empires (Apple had crossed the threshold in Q3, but has since fallen) and have become staples in many folks portfolios. Since the demand for those stocks may be leveling off, I think the prices may level off as well unless they come out the woodworks with groundbreaking tech. I still believe companies in the tech space are still great opportunities, so I’ve picked up companies like Adobe (The Photoshop company), Okta (Cloud-based identity management company) and Roku (Streaming Service).

And lastly, as this is an election year, this election season was bound to throw some blows on the stock market. With the Federal Reserve intending to increase interest rates in December, a new party in charge of The House of Representatives, and uncertain tariff and trade talks between the US and other allies in the world, there’s a lot that’s causing so much turmoil in the market today. October saw some horrendous numbers with the drop of the S&P, Dow, and many global exchanges. October wiped out significant gains in many well-diversified portfolios and November has been a bumpy and rough uphill battle to recover.

So with the holiday season upon us, I have a lot to hope for. One of those things is recovering my returns. Another thing is to be more consistent here and to workout more. Pray for me ya’ll. I definitely need it.

Until next post…

Featured Picture: Bronco in Deep Thought