Earlier this week a co-worker told me about ecodrivingusa.com. I know I've beaten this topic to death, but I thought this site was pretty good. I liked the intro by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It always happens after I sell a stock. I keep checking the price to see if the timing of my sale was favorable. So far, it looks like I made the right move.

I sold Google at $468.89 per share, right now, in after hours trading, it's down to only $448.77. If I had sold it at where it is now, I basically would have made nothing.

I sold most of my Apple shares at $172.55 and now it's down to $161.40.

I imagine I'm going to keep watching these stocks for at least a year so I'll have some idea if I made the right move or not.

I realized not long ago that I really didn't understand Google's business and I really had no idea what their earnings potential was or what the value of their stock "should be". I freaked out when the value of the stock started getting close to where I bought it at and figured maybe I should get out. It only took a few articles which claimed that Google's growth was going to be less than exciting to convince me to sell the stock.

I bought 4.6343 shares of Google on March 18th at a total cost of $2,000. Today, I sold all of my shares (@ $468.89 per share) and walked away with $2,163.02. Not terribly exciting gains, but far better than taking a loss.

Since I held this stock for less than a year, my profits are subject to the "short term capital gains tax", which is basically a tax penalty for selling the stock as a "trade" rather than an "investment". Currently, I think the short term capital gains tax is something like 35%. (It actually used to be worse, but Bush lowered it--ya know, to help out middle class people who are struggling to make ends meet.)

So, in the end, I'm going to walk away with a profit of just $105.96. Again, not very exciting. However, I did manage to get a 5% return in less than six months. In order to do the same with a savings account or a CD, it would have to be paying out at something like 10% APR. I also beat the return of the S&P 500, which had a negative return over the same period.

Today I sold most of my Apple shares at $172.55 per share. My thinking was that I should capture most of my profit now to be safe, but leave room for me to sell some of my shares at a higher price if Apple happens to go higher. (Though, knowing what I know now, I don't know that the stock is going to be much higher than this anytime in the near future.)

I almost sold all of my Google stock this morning, but decided not to sell any of it when I found out that they had just released their own web browser. My thinking was that the stock would go up at least $10 per share, but I figured it could go up a lot more than that, so if I sold it after it when up $10, I could be missing out. I figured it would be safe to wait a day, then sell after that. I think I might have been wrong:



Had I entered my order as I originally planned to, I may have been able to sell Google as high as $480 per share, which is $14.75 more per share than it is now.

I tried to find a reason for why the stock began to take a dive around 1:30 PM, and according to this article the reason seemed to be because the Federal Reserve released the minutes to the meeting held on August 5th. In these minutes, it indicated that three of the Fed districts had a desire to increase interest rates. When people who control loads of money in the stock market found this out, they pulled a lot of money out of the stock market because it makes less sense to have money in the stock market when interest rates are higher, so this caused various stocks, like Google and Apple, to decline in value through no fault of those companies.

Here is the traffic we cleverly avoided leaving Gillette Stadium after the soccer game on Saturday. I enjoyed seeing the giant mass of cars all bunched up.

Maybe I don't want a Chevy Volt after all.

Meanwhile, Honda and Toyota continue to not completely suck.

Finally a presidential candidate who speaks what I've been so desperate to hear. Finally one who speaks sense. Finally one who calls out his opponent's cheap political tactics for what they really are.