Six Figure Investor

If you are investing on your own – especially an individual stock picker – you need to have a strategy and a plan. Strategy involves deciding how you want to invest and the techniques that you want to use to get there. Once you have a strategy, execute a plan that implements that strategy. Then, your overall results wouldn’t be complete with an honest assessment of how your plan is working out based upon your expectations.

I will write a post in the future on this, but my portfolio strategy involves:

• I chose concentration over diversification. I want to own more of my winners, not less.
• I don’t try to beat the market necessarily, but I am aiming to own investments that have an expected return profile which may not beat the market. It’s about return expectations.
• I focus more on management quality than financials. It’s the management quality and my confidence in them that got me through 2008-2010.

There is another side to successful investing and that is good personal finance. Here are some articles that I read this weekend that focus on personal finance and investing techniques.

This past week I wrote a two part article on an investing technique of using margin to make more money investing. This is obviously an advanced topic, but there has never been a time when margin it as attractive as an investing tool then now. Use this technique to make more money because the central banks around the world are providing the opportunity.

Dividend Mantra talks about how Your Savings Rate Trumps Your Investment Return. Amen. You have probably read all those articles that talk about how you can become a millionaire by investing all the money you spend on your daily latte. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, to be successful you need to do the hard work and save the money first. DM shows you the math.

I had written an article before about how Slow Growth Beats High Growth, which talks about how higher yielding investments with lower growth will get you where you need to be if you are investing. So here’s a formula for investing success: save your money and make more money with dividend stocks, don’t worry about killer returns.

Dividend Ninja recommended a new investor site (another Ninja!) called InvestingNinja. This site will focus on options strategies from a dividend investor point of view. This is a technique that I’m not currently using but will get around to in the future.  This is a good idea for a niche site, I will be adding it to my reading list.

MoneyCone is back! After an unannounced hiatus for many months, he has put up a new post on his site, The Fund That Beat The Market 9 Times Since 1999. It goes without saying that if you are passively investing using funds, watch your expenses. If you buy individual stocks like I do, it’s less of a concern.

When it comes to investing, there are always opportunities and you always have new money to invest. So, put your money into the opportunities occurring now. I look for opportunities when dividend stocks pass key dividend yields. Here’s a few that were noted recently:

Lockheed Martin Became a 5% Yielder: Dividend Growth Stocks

Lorillard Became A 5% Yielder: (my post).

Intel Became a 4% Yielder: Dividend Growth Machine

Kraft (KFT) a 4.5% Yielder: Barrons, after the grocery business spinoff, KRFT will yield 4.5% versus 2.8% for the whole company now.