Pettit Funds

Well, I was just getting ready to have my pick of the week be a stock called Aur Resources (AUR), when I discovered that I pretty much already own it. A pick of mine back in January of this year was Teck Cominco (TCK)–which is up over 37% since then, by the way–and this company has bought almost all of the shares of AUR.

So…I’m going to go with a nice big, boring pipeline company: Oneok Partners LP (OKS)–mostly because I’m a little under-weighted in energy in my personal investments. (But of course, my fantasy fund at Marketocracy–Pettit Energy Fund–is doing gangbusters…)

Happy Investing!

From this month’s MONEY Magazine:

Pop quiz: Which investment produced the best returns over the past 20 years? When asked this in a recent survey conducted by the PBS series MoneyTrack, 18- to 24-year-olds responded thus:

a) 52% said savings accounts;

b) 20% said bonds;

c) 16% said stocks.

In other words, they got it backward. Stocks outperformed savings accounts by 11 percentage points annually, bonds by 9 points…

*****

72% of these kids had it dead wrong.

Parents and teachers: Where were you?

I know a lot of people in my parents’ generation never have and never will own a stock. Why not? Because they are still paralyzed with fear from something called The Depression that occurred about 75 years ago.

75 years ago. Yawn…

Yet the S&P 500 has gained 10.2% a year since pre-Depression 1925.

Yeah, stocks go up and down. Wooooooo! Scaaaaary!

But I personally guarantee you: If you 20-somethings haven’t done better in 50 years from now by investing in stocks than if you just let it sit in savings, I’ll make up the difference. (’Course I’ll have been dead for a few years by then–but that doesn’t make me wrong!)

   I’ve decided this week to “purchase” these three energy stocks for my Pettit Energy Fund hosted at the Marketocracy site (and which has shown a better than 33% annual return since its inception on Jan. 25, 2003):

   Dril-Quip Inc. (DRQ); Headwaters Inc. (HW); and Tidewater Inc. (TDW).

   I don’t claim to be any kind of an energy “expert”, but I do use the same methodology in selecting these stocks as I do for my Pettit Mutual Fund #1–and, technically, you would have had a better return investing in the Energy Fund than in this latter one (PMF1 “only” has a 30% annual return since January, 2003).

   Currently the Pettit Energy Fund has the #14 highest performance of the 70,000 or so funds monitored at the Marketocracy site over the last 3 years (#33 over the previous 4-year period).

   Good luck!

So much bubbling and churning in the stock market these last few weeks, that several new stocks have gotten my attention. I’m going to take positions in Brasil Telecom S.A. (BTM) and American Equity Investment Life Holding Co. (AEL).

I’m finding Air France KLM (AKH) to be tempting, also–but I probably won’t bite. You may want to.

Good luck!

   A tip of the hat to the Mortgage Loan Place Blog.