Investing Experiment: 05/24/2016

I just remembered there was another stock I wanted to try out, Simon Property Group, Inc. (SPG). I live near a mall owned by this group and there are always a good number of people there whenever I stop by. During the last year's Christmas shopping, I had to go to multiple places to get gifts for everyone. Each shopping district was packed. Granted this was Christmas season, so obviously there would be many shoppers, but I happened to visit a few of them again and still saw numerous shoppers. This captured my interest, so I did a little online review and discovered that some of them belonged to the Simon Property Group. Seeing how well their stock has performed, lead to me adding this stock to my possible investment list.

Since I still had some left over cash in the Investopedia Stock Simulator, I thought, "Why not?" and decided to purchase a few shares.

Stock	# of Shares	Purchase Price
SPG	5	196.57

So now I have $1,467.63 left in cash on this simulator. Since I follow the "Buy and Hold" strategy, it will take a while for the dividends to bring back what I lost in commission fees alone. I also discovered that this simulator does not have an automatic dividend reinvestment option. I find the DRIP option very useful in slowly growing my portfolio since I can get partial shares without incurring more fees. Considering that Investopedia has a quick post about DRIP, I had hoped they would include it in their simulator. Oh well. That just means I will have to wait longer before buying more stocks or I adjust my strategy to do more trades to offset all the commission charges.

Click here to see an overview of my investing experiment.
Previous update: 05/18/2016
Next update: 06/09/2016

Investing Experiment: 05/18/2016

My orders were fulfilled this morning with the following purchases:

Stock	# of Shares	Purchase Price
MMM	5	166.33
PG	11	79.84
JNJ	8	113.40
DIV	38	24.58
O	15	60.91
EPR	13	69.95
LTC	20	46.85
STAG	46	20.81

The rankings were calculated this morning before the market opened, thus my ranking was based on my $10,000 starting point. So, yay! My rank is 611. Considering I lost $239.60 from commission fees, my rank is probably going to drop about 100-150 points depending on how well everyone else performs. I might get lucky and all my stocks rise in price, which will bring me back into the 600 range. However, I prefer to be pessimistic when it comes to money, so I'm going to presume that I will hang around the 700s ranks until dividends start to come in.

Click here to see an overview of my investing experiment.
Previous update: 05/17/2016
Next update: 05/24/2016

Investing Experiment: 05/17/2016

I joined the "Start with $10,000" game in Investopdia's Stock Simulator.

The market was already closed, so I put in the order for the stocks I wanted in my simulator portfolio. I pretended I only have $1,000 for each stock and orders the following number of shares:

Stock	# of Shares
MMM	5
PG	11
JNJ	8
DIV	38
O	15
EPR	13
LTC	20
STAG	46

There's an overall ranking system in this game. I applaud today's #1 person, who managed to earn $51,935.05 using just $10,000.

Since I placed 8 orders and the commission is $29.95 for each trade (expensive! I am so glad in real life my broker doesn't have this steep of a fee), then I just lost $239.60. Whelp, that will knock my ranking down right off the bat. Let's hope one or both of my strategies will eventually help recoup my losses.

Click here to see an overview of my investing experiment.
Next update: 05/18/2016