Interest rate hike

As anyone following the market must have seen by now, that the interest rates have been hiked by the Feds by about 25 basis points. Not bad for savers who were used to 0-0.25% to get that extra 0.25% likely in future. Expect to see some good hikes in the online savings bank world. The days of brick and mortar bank, just like radio shack or blockbuster or circuit city, are pretty much on the wane. Many of them, small and big, have right fully identified customer service as the key differentiator and one can see that only a handful are really surviving and rest are going to need a bailout in future if at all they make it. Anyhow, I think this will have broader impact on stock market. First off, today was a day of rally. Maybe the star wars: force awakens or whatever else is this temporary excitement, I think this is short lived. (Typical celebration in wall street maybe? ) Dont know what will be there in the long run but the indexes have pretty much tapered off and leveled off with the same ranges being breached repeatedly. If the sucker had to go up, it would have gone by now. Which means only one direction to go from here. Or maybe not. Who knows? :D.

Back to investment avenues, recently I had posted on having fixed set of investment avenues, bellweather pulses which help you identify them and create or augment them on the fly and maybe you can stick a range in which you are comfortable to buy, hold and sell them. I think that is a pretty good strategy for your ancillary holdings. Assuming your core holdings in index, this ancillary will be real turbo charge or not, and help you get some extra cushion. Various strategies here like dividend paying, growth stocks and so on, dual stocks, swingers etc can be employed for this space. But be very clear about the goals of this stocks set and how and when to convert them back to cash or index positions.

Avenues

It makes sense to go about in the market with limited avenues of investments. These tools are generally tied to the preferred mutual fund company such as American funds or vanguard or fidelity or t.rowe.price and so on. There are many small yet well performing companies too. Similarly, there are various aspects of these vehicles such as index funds or active funds or a balanced fund or target fund which are usually a mix of index and active funds. This post will try to give you a general sense of these tools.
Fidelity for instance is led by FCNTX and co. The rest of the funds are selected based on the prevailing factors. Similarly, Vanguard has VWELX, Wellesley and Wellington funds and general balanced funds on top of index funds. Note that many times, the vanguard funds do under perform active funds such as FCNTX but in the interest of diversification you never would want to stick to any one in particular. Similarly in stocks world, the pulse basket is good but you may want to whittle down that to just few stocks. Now, do not get attached to any one of them and hence it is good to blog in general. For instance, you may look at Pepsi vs coke but look deeper and you may be comfortable with Dr. Pepper. A home depot vs lowe might give you ideas about something else in this sector. Or just stick with REIT. Same with dual stocks such as CVS/WAG or AXP/COF or the famous, or rather the preferred one of this blog which is the FDX/UPS. They might give you a general sense of things. Most importantly, they will give you a sense of how to go about with these investments in the long run. That is very important. This gives you idea about how much to invest, when to get in and when to get out and when to stay put are the three most crucial decisions in the investment landscape. Now, most of us or many of us do not do this on a day to day basis for a living. We just want to safeguard and expand our nest eggs. So most important of all, this should be something that is very very low stress and low maintenance. Think of this as iphone or i* .. so your own iFund. That you are designing this iFund to take care of everything else. Some model is needed to better understand this. The upside of having this iFund would be you would become detached from it and look at it in whole as well as look at it in pieces. As with everything else in life this is a continous learning process. Finance as a whole is not as important as say health, or life, or relationships but they are all interconnected and better to have a stable one in all aspects rather than something that drags the rest down.