I'm back!

Hey guys!  I'm back!  Sorry it's been so long.  Lot of interesting things happened to me in the year.  First of all, I got married, so here's a shoutout to my new bride (Priya)!  After that my sister got married, and then my new brother-in-law had a baby.  Also, the company I work for just got purchased by IBM. 

So as you can see, it's been a busy year for me.  Now that the excitement has calmed down, I'm going to go back to doing regular posts.

Now down to business.  I've changed the format and layout of the blog.  Looks like while I was out blogger added a bunch of new features which I'm going to try to incorporate in my blog.

I was looking over my earlier posts.  Crazy how things have changed since I posted.  Previously, I was blogging in the depths of the financial crisis.  Now the market has stabilized, and we're just waiting for the employment numbers to come back.  I want to review a little bit about what I blogged about before.

Corporate Bonds -  This strategy has been working out great.  Every bond I've purchased last year is over $100 (I recommend buying below $100).  A lot of my bonds have been called, a lot of them were "make whole" bonds that I bought, so I got my full value early.  I then rolled those over into other bonds that will hopefully be called at full value.  A lot of them also have given me tender offers where they will give me most of the money upfront instead of waiting 2-3 years for the rest.  This is thanks to low interest rates right now, since no one wants to pay these high interest rates when they can sell new bonds at lower rates.  Now, this does make it difficult to buy new bonds at higher rates since there are not as many since interest rates are so low, but I still do find bonds >5%.

Gold - As you guys know, gold is at it's all time high.  I blogged before about how I didn't understand gold and it is a speculative investment and so I wouldn't buy it.  I've changed my mind.  I ended up buying some at $1100 an ounce.  I feel that gold is in a bull market right now and it could hit $2000 an ounce.  I could be wrong but the way the government is spending and printing money, I don't see how gold will come down anytime soon.  Peter Schiff, who i follow, is prediciting $5000 an ounce.

I am going to be blogging regularly..if there are any questions you guys have or if there is any topic you want me to cover, let me know.