Mad Money Machine

Spring Cleaning Time

With the first day of spring here, let’s do some spring cleaning in the Cramer Portfolio. Let’s get rid of the big losers for tax-loss selling. (We can always buy them back in 31 days, right?)
So that means we’ll be pulling up the biggest weeds in the portfolio: CROX, NOV, and IRBT. CROX is down almost 25% since we bought it at its peak :-(. NOV is down and remember we sold NBR at a loss to buy NOV. Maybe we’ll plow it back into King HAL. Then we picked up IRBT from the previous big winner STX.

We’ll sell at the market tomorrow at 10:30.

I’m not pleased with the performance of the Cramer portfolio compared to the ETF portfolio. Folks, the idea was that we were going to beat the indices. It kinda looks funny now, because EVERY ONE of the ETFs is beating EVERY ONE of the Cramer featured stocks. But remember, most of the Cramer stocks were bought more recently since we’ve been making trades in that portfolio.

But the bottom line in this little experiment, ETFs are beating the stock picker. And not only in pure performance, but also in the total fees, in the total taxes, and in the total amount of time to pick the stocks. Hopefully the rest of 2006 will turn things around. We’ll see… Interesting anyway, wouldn’t you say?