New Investment

I bought a new stock the other day. KEMET is headquartered in Simpsonville, SC and they make capacitors. Exciting stuff huh? It looks overvalued at first because it had a P/E over 800 (according to Yahoo it's now 945.) but if you look closer it seems to be because they had been struggling recently with an acquisition and other things. It's actually very reasonably priced if you look at Price/Sales which I have been using more often lately. They released earnings today and it looks like I bought at a good price as they beat the Wall Street estimates. So my investment in them is already up 9.46%. Bonus! If I'm still holding them in May, I may go to their annual meeting because it's in reasonable driving range. It would be my first shareholder's meeting. I've had opportunities before when I owned fairly local companies (Family Dollar, Krispy Kreme) but I was always in school. So we'll see how that goes.

My other investment this year, Lenox, has finally calmed down some from the massive volatility. If any big news comes I'm sure it'll move quickly though. But I'm still up 12.74% so I won't complain.

In fact, Cogent is still my only loser at present. It lost another 4.34% today so now I've lost over $400 with them in just a couple months. I'd hate to sell though, because it looks even more attractively priced than when I bought in. I'll just have to accept that I paid too much for it.

I've had 6 down days in the last 8 but it's still been a good start to the year. Here's how I compare to the major indices since the start of the year.

Dow Jones Industrials: +0.32%
Nasdaq Composite: +0.78%
S&P 500: +0.39%
Wilshire 5000: +0.71%
Jeb's Portfolio: +2.45%

So the nearest competitor to me is the NASDAQ and I'm beating it by 1.67 percentage points. Not bad. And because I've not bored you enough as it is, let's see how all my positions have done so far since the beginning of the year.

American Eagle Outfitters: +3.78% Still going strong
Activision: -0.70% Had a bad day today, but my all time longest holding has been one of my best investments.
Bed Bath & Beyond: +7.17% Doing quite nicely. Maybe my patience is finally paying off. Rumors of a buyout are constant
CDW: +0.61% They release earnings tomorrow so this could change drastically by the end of the day.
C&D Technologies: +7.81% Not really any news, but it's just been rising every day it seems.
Cogent: -5.90% We're not on speaking terms.
Deltathree: +11.90% Very good start so far. No news out though so I don't know if it will last.
Global-Tech Appliances: +9.82% Same as above. Not a lot of daily trading, so one trade can shift the price substantially.
Harbor Bond Fund: -0.51% I've been a little underwhelmed by my first mutual fund pick so far. Hopefully the rest of the year will be better.
JAKKS Pacific: -9.98% This is the stock my brother has a partial investment in. That looks bad, but it had a big run-up late last year so maybe the gains are just being trimmed. At least I hope so.
Joy Global: -3.25% Pretty volatile. I'm not really concerned about the movements lately.
KEMET: +9.46% Just bought them this week so it's a great start.
Lenox: +12.74% Bought them after that massive sell-off. Same as KEMET.
Navteq: -3.86% I've done pretty well with them. Tech has been volatile (as always) so short-term not real concerned.
Pacific Sunwear: +2.96% My other clothing retailer. Not done quite as well as American Eagle but I'm still pleased.
Yahoo: +10.45% Probably doing so well because it couldn't have gotten worse. Haha. I was surprised it's been my second best performer among stocks I had at the start of the year. At least it's beaten Google. If only I could say that for when I bought Yahoo in August. I've said Google was overvalued. Since I bought Yahoo, it's up 5.12%. In the same timeframe, Google is up more than 30%. Can't win them all.