Investment Style

Some of you might be curious about my asset allocation and investment style.

I'll be highlighting some of my investments in the days and weeks to come but in the meantime, I'll just say that I currently have over 50 percent of my assets sitting in cash earning 4 to 4.25 percent interest (depending on the savings account) as I wait for some of the stocks on my watch list to reach my target buying prices. I know that interest income isn't very tax friendly but I like the assurance of having the cash readily available to fund my sometimes, itchy trigger finger.

As for my investment style, I really don't have one defined yet. At the moment, I'm more growth-oriented but would like to start developing a bigger basket of dividend-yielding stocks that I don't have to keep an eye on a daily basis. On the rare occasions when I have the opportunity to watch the stock market during the day, I might try to make a quick trade or two to take advantage of a volatile or news-worthy stock on an intraday basis. I mostly rely on basic pattern recognition to determine entry / exit points on stocks that I have a real desire to keep for the longer term. Due to the lacklustre performance of the US Dollar of late, I'm currently concentrating on Canadian stocks so I don't have to worry about the brokerage's exchange rate and extra commissions.

The majority of my investment ideas originally come from reading online forums, BNN interviews of a few analysts I respect, and a local call-in radio show called "The Friday Market Monitor."

For those of you outside of the Ottawa region, you can listen to "The Friday Market Monitor" via the 580 CFRA website between the hours of 1 and 3 Eastern on Friday afternoons. They usually run a quarterly stock pick contest in the last half hour where people call in with some great new stocks on a regular basis. I highly recommend listening and even participating in the show, especially for its contest portion.