Fording Canadian Coal Trust

FDG continues to intrigue me as a story of the power of mfi. It took a lot of hemming and hawing for me to decide to keep FDG when a year was up. I was at nearly a 23% loss for the year of holding the stock and it had barely budged from that performance. Yet, when it came time to choose 5 new stocks, there it was, still in the list. This was in May. Now in March, which was my one year anniversary of MFI, PNCL was still in the list and was up for sale in my March batch. random.org managed to pick PNCL again, so I didn't need to think about whether I wanted to hold a stock still in the list. But in May, FDG was not picked by random.org and I had to make the call. Do I deviate from my strategy of being purely random, or do I give the system a chance, since it was still a "top" stock?

When PNCL had been up for renewal, I knew I wanted to let it keep riding since it was still in the MFI list. (As of 6/15, it was up 10.6% since March). I had been thinking about this for many months before my first anniversary date. The mfi website says it's purely up to you if you want to keep a stock still on the list. I had been leaning towards doing that for months. But, FDG was the first stock to challenge this idea. Ultimately, I decided I would go with it. So, not only did I keep it, but I bought more, because it was now underweighted due to its losses (and also because I'm investing more in MFI this second year, to make it 25% of my entire investment portfolio. Regardless of its successes thus far, and I hope it will continue, I would never let 30 stocks be a larger amount of my portfolio. The rest of my family's portfolio are in diversified mutual funds and a couple of other stocks, picked for specific reasons and surprisingly doing well).

Right after I "re-bought" it, FDG started to rise. In fact, not only is it profitable since May, but as of Friday, it has regained ALL of the losses from 5/06 - 5/07. The increase since early May is 21.31%. While it's only at a weighted gain since 5/06 of 4.68%, it's still a testament to the power of mfi.

Slightly over three weeks to my third buy/sell date, 7/9.