Why ATM Fees Now Make Me Smile

I travel a lot, and while Wainwright Bank here in Boston has been great, I was just so rarely near one of their ATMs when I needed cash, that I often had to swallow obnoxious ATM fees.

As they say, you don't know what you've got until it's gone (true story: I saw them in concert in 1987. Twice.), and I had no idea just how annoying those fees really are until I stopped paying them. OK, I technically do still pay the fee, but every month I now get all of those fees refunded:

    01/31/2008    ATMREBATE    ATM Fee Rebate    $10.75

Schwab's not the only bank to offer ATM fee rebates, and now may be a great time to find one that works for you.

New Round of MFI Picks

I picked up my (now quarterly) basket of new MFI stocks on Monday (I was a bit too tied up to post sooner). All of these had recent data in the MFI screener:

• Cal Dive International (DVR)
• Maximus (MMS)
• Supertex (SUPX)
• American Eagle Outfitters (AEO)
• Administaff (ASF)

Also sold the following:

• FDG (+45.89%)
• WDC (+47.02%)

The full list of holdings has been updated.

Performance Update (Live from New York)

I'm in New York this week, where I had the opportunity to attend the O'Reilly Money:Tech Conference, and while the conference content was excellent, I was left with mixed feelings about the market.

On the plus side, seeing and hearing so many market luminaries left me re-energized about investing, and excited to make my next round of picks (doing bi-weekly picks was problematic for two reasons: it was a lot of work; and the MFI site only updates with quarterly reports, so in some cases I was working off data nearly 3 months old).

One of the highlights from the conference was a conversation between conference program chair Paul Kedrosky and Mad Money's Jim Cramer. Not only is Jim as entertaining as you'd expect in person, he was very bullish on GOOG. (He said a lot of people were making "momentum" decisions: they open the drawer today, it says 'sell google'; after the market improves, they'll open the drawer again and it'll say 'buy google'.)

On the downside, there's a strong consensus among the Wall Street crowd that we're either in or heading toward a recession (an interesting data point here). While that does mean market opportunities, it also means a lot of people are looking at some lean times ahead.

Regardless, I'll be making a new round of MFI picks on Monday, this time five at a time (done every quarter to leave me with 20 at any given time). On that note (and because I'm tired of that Covestor widget to your right mocking me -- that precipitous decline you see in July coincides almost exactly with my Covestor signup), I thought I'd post my performance since inception, which now represents about 18 months of data. Still short-term, but I find the results encouraging: 25.32% against the S&P's 8.66% for the same period.

You can read about how this performance is calculated here. (There was actually someone from FolioFN at the conference, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to connect.)

Best Week Ever

Yes, it's the name of VH1's knockoff of E!'s equally vapid-yet-addicting The Soup. But while last week certainly wasn't the best week ever, it was the best week the Dow and the S&P have seen since March of 2003.

So what? Well, amid the market's recent turmoil, such strong upside is of course nearly impossible to predict. Anyone with cold feet who bailed last Friday really lost out.

Again, so what? Well, it's OK to nervously watch the CNBC ticker. But unless it's your actual day job, it's not OK to do anything about it. The technical way to talk about why it's a good idea to just methodically invest regardless of daily/weekly/monthly market movements is Dollar-Cost Averaging. The non-technical way to talk about it is that you have no idea whether this week will be another Best-Week-In-Five-Years.

For most people, putting money into the stock market (or taking it out) should be a long-view decision: "For the next 5/10/30 years, I'm going to put 10% of my income into an index fund"; "I'm retiring in 10 years, so it's probably time to shift from 85% stocks to 60% stocks".