Some thoughts

It's been quite some times since I last posted. I think I last posted when I was still in New York City... I miss it greatly.

I have been back in Oregon now for about four months. I just finished my first final exam for the fall term and now am more ready than ever to pack up my car and hit I-5 headed south for Medford. A lot has happened this term...and in the last month I was home for the summer.

You may know that at the end of last school-year, I rose to the position of Portfolio Manager of the Oregon State Investment Group's Large-Cap Core Fund. It is a $1 million endowment given to us by the Oregon State University Foundation to manage real equity. The market has slowly been decaying, it seems, for around a year now. However, it was hit the worst in September and October, 2008, when the financial industry more-or-less fell apart. Lehman Brothers was left for dead by the government, AIG was "bailed out"...and many prominent firms that once ruled the Street no longer existed. It was very saddening, actually making me sick to my stomach to think about. It was an interesting time to be made Portfolio Manager of $1 million as a senior in college. It still is. We fully invested our cash into equities on October 14, 2008. Since inception, our fund is down 7.63%, compared to the our benchmark (S&P 500), down 10.16%. While most fund managers would be overjoyed with outperforming their benchmark, I am unsettled. It is hard to take losses. I know it is unrealized, but it is still a loss for the foundation. I like to make money... and I want to make money for the foundation. Absolute returns are what I fight for, regardless of the market environment.

We began the fund in Select Sector SPDR ETFs just to get our sector allocation in place. As we went further into the term, we had a few stocks that were pitched as BUYS. Of those, we purchased eight: NKE (+28% since purchase), DNA (+5% since purchase), GIS (+4% since purchase), EXC (+1% since purchase), HPQ (-8% since purchase), QCOM (-13% since purchase), ITW (-13% since purchase), BBT (-17% since purchase). As you can see, we've made some outstanding purhcases. For our holdings that are down, we still believe in the fundamental strength of the companies going into the future. We are keeping our eye on BBT, trust me.

That was just a brief portfolio update for now.

Michael