Investment Gym

We’re always adding workouts to our free Investment Gym blog to help you improve your investment fitness. If you’re just getting started, learn the basics of stock investing. Everyone is welcome and it’s free!

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Woman With Portfolio is designed for a growing community of women who are interested in investing wisely. We've learned that we can't always count on Social Security, fairy godmothers, the lottery or even the men in our lives to provide us with financial security. And even those of us with abundant incomes need to learn how to make the most of what we have.

We are concerned with ensuring not only our own futures, but also those of our children and of our planet, by investing in companies that look out for their shareholders, their employees, and the environment.

We are not day traders or would-be overnight millionaires. We think patience pays off.

We use our strengths. Many of us tend to be good at spotting trends, finding bargains and recognizing malarky when we see it. These can be terrific assets in investing. Call it intuition, intelligence or good judgment, we think women actually have a tactical advantage in investing, particularly when we share our knowledge and do our homework.

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Our Fair Shares Portfolio

Pink Slips Sink Ships 11 hours, 14 minutes ago

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Putting a New Spin on Memory

We’re venturing this week into the next big thing in computing and nanotech for a possible very long-term investment. We’re talking about something called “spintronics,” which to get technical, refers to magnetorresistive random access memory (MRAM), which many experts expect to become the “universal memory” for storing data. We’re looking at a company that has the lion’s share of intellectual property in this hot new field.

June 22, 2009 • Read More!

Factoring In the Flu Factor

imageThe World Health Organization declared an H1N1 flu pandemic today, the first global flu epidemic in 41 years, as infections climbed around the world. WHO will now ask drugmakers to speed up production of an H1N1 flu vaccine, prompting governments to devote more money toward efforts to contain the virus. Which brings us to our review of stocks that will be affected, and our conclusions about which ones still have the most upside.

June 11, 2009 • Read More!

Steeling ourselves for the near future

You may have noted that metal stocks have begun to move up. It does seem early in the so-called recovery for this sort of move, but we noticed that one company in particularly has been gleaming amid all the gloom. This one might help protect your portfolio from corrosion!

June 5, 2009 • Read More!

Progress Report

imageWe currently have 18 stocks in our Fairest Shares Portfolio, and our average gain is now around 33%. More than half our choices are up over 20%. Nearly half are up more than 30%. We have seven stocks up over 40%. Our alternative energy ETF is up nearly 70%, and our best performer, a green energy power company, has now more than doubled.

June 1, 2009 • Read More!

Looking to Chile for Commodities

We’ve been looking for prospects that will lead the way out of the recession, and our small-cap growth ETF, which has gained more than 40% since we added it to the Fairest Shares Portfolio, has done a good job. But now we’re looking at commodities, which also tend to lead the way out of a recession. Our Chilean commodity stock, which we added last month to our portfolio, has done quite well for us, and we expect it to continue to perform well.

May 29, 2009 • Read More!

Investing without Losing Your Sleep, Your Shirt or Your Soul!
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How Much Is a Wrinkle Worth?

A very good friend of ours in her early 80s recently had to use a prescription skin cream to remove some precancerous spots on her face. Her face turned red and blotchy for a week, but after the treatment, not only were the lesions gone; so were some wrinkles. We made a note, wondering if this was the usual result. If so, we thought, here’s an inexpensive and effective wrinkle treatment. And maybe a promising stock. And this morning, we found a report confirming what we had suspected.

June 16, 2009 • Read More!

The Five-Minute Investing Workout: A Tip for Indexers

We’re always talking about the ease and relative safety of using index funds in order to diversify your investments. You spread the risk and minimize expenses. And although your fund will follow the market down, it will also rise when it recovers. We’ve been watching a rather surprising rebound in the market since it bottomed in March, and we have a little tip for investors who’d like to give a little boost to their indexing.

June 1, 2009 • Read More!

Our Success Story

We’ll admit that we had something to prove when we first opened the doors to Woman with Portfolio and invited other women to join us in our investing quest. We launched this site around Thanksgiving, 2007. It was like setting out in a new sailboat, knowing that storm clouds were on the horizon, and that we would be testing our sailing skills during a hurricane. The market was plummeting, and we had to adjust our strategy and make some key decisions to stay out of trouble and keep moving ahead. We’re happy to say that we have not only outperformed the market; we’ve been gaining steadily, even at times when nearly everyone else was losing. We’re taking advantage of the market’s volatility, which has offered some great investing opportunities, both short-term and long-term.

June 1, 2009 • Read More!

The Five-Minute Investing Workout: Allocate, Allocate, Allocate

We’re going to be helping our busy and beginning investors by including some quick and easy workouts in the investment gym to help you boost your portfolio. This week’s workout is about one of the most important and basic tools in the investing toolbox: allocation. It’s time for a quick check-up of how your investment assets are allocated.

May 15, 2009 • Read More!

What Do You Do with a Winner?

After the market has gotten such a battering, it’s a relief to talk about what to do when you have a winner in the market, a stock or ETF (exchange-traded fund) that has gained substantially since you bought it. Fortunately, we do have several of these in our Fairest Shares portfolio. Do we just let them ride, hoping they’ll keep climbing?

May 5, 2009 • Read More!

The Flu Factor: A Lesson in Market Dynamics

Things can happen quickly at times in the market. Over the weekend, fears of a flu pandemic incubated, and the result was a drastic drop in some stocks and a quick rise in others, offering a quick lesson in market behavior and in the need for making ethical as well as practical choices in investing. 

April 27, 2009 • Read More!

Does Mr. Market Need a Sugar Pick-Me-Up?

Today’s lesson in trend-watching has to do with what we hunger for when we get anxious about money. Here’s a clue: Things that are cheap, sweet and fattening. When is there a better time for comfort foods and cheap vices than a downturn?

March 24, 2009 • Read More!

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