Treading Water in Porfolio’s

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After a week of the S&P 500 simply moving sideways and interest rates pretty much just hanging out around 2.35% (10 year treasury) our portfolio’s have done just the same.  As we survey all of our holdings it would seem that we should not expect much portfolio movement to the upside anytime soon.  Certainly there are ‘black swan’ events out there, but of all the normal types of events (i.e. retail sales, employment etc) the only one that could haveobvious effects to markets would be oil prices.  As always one can make a case for the consumer being helped from lower prices at the pump and thus spending more on the holiday season, but honestly we are skeptical of this actually happening.

We have moved enough of our portfolio holdings around for the time being (from perpetual preferreds to term preferreds and exchange traded debt)–and in fact we would prefer to never trade issues–it is so much easier to simply leave everything ‘as is’.  Knowing that we hate losing capital we simply have to force ourselves to make the moves that will be beneficial in the longer term.  To date we have not had to reduce monthly income much at all as newer exchange traded debt issues have come to market at good yields (and of course higher risk).

The 2014 Model closes the week with YTD gains of around 11%–if we ended the year at this level we would be satisfied.  The newer ultra safe (we hope and it remains to be seen if longer term this performs as hoped for) 2014 Short/Medium Duration Portfolio has performed exactly as hoped with minimal movement, up or down.  Current yield is 6.66%

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Tim McPartland
Tim McPartland is a private investor with over 45 years of investing experience. His analysis, research and writing is devoted to the hunt for income producing securities of all types, but in particular specializing in preferred stocks, exchange traded debt and Master Limited Partnerships.
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