It has been a while since my last post. It is partly because I have no new transaction to report, and partly because I have been busy with other stuff and haven’t had a chance to follow the market closely.

It seems like market has stabilized a little. S&P 500 has been at or around 800 for about a month now. I thought, once the first quarter earning reports starts to come out, the market may go down again. But so far, it has been holding up nicely because of some positive news from the banking sector. Today, JP Morgan reported it’s earning and it beat the market expectation. Wells Fargo also indicated last week that they’ll make a record profit for the first quarter. However, the real test of the financial sector will come from Bank of America, which reports it’s earning on April 20th and Citigroup which will release it’s earning before the market opens tomorrow. Let’s hope both of these companies follow the recent trend of financials beating the wall street expectation.

Looking at our own portfolio, it seems to be doing well since I posted my update back in February. From being down 19.48%, we are now up 18.8%. That is a 38% turnaround not including any dividends we received, while during the same time S&P 500 is up 16.4%. AK Steel, US Steel and DuPont  are the ones that are up significantly since the last update. I am also happy to report that our portfolio has a dividend yield of 3.7% as long as they don’t cut dividends any further. Here is the portfolio summary as of April 16, 2009.

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