Some of my regular readers will remember that I sold several of my stock holdings back in the fall of 2012.  The reason for the selling action was discussed here.  This is the conclusion to that sell off that I never had a chance to write about.

The other stocks that were sold in addition to AT&T were MCD, SFL, & TEF.  The end result of these transactions looks like this:

MCD: 23.4% gain

TEF: 9.4% loss

SFL: 14.8% loss

I don’t make it a habit of doing this much selling in my portfolio.  It was the potential for making a real estate deal that ultimately did not work out that required me to raise some cash from my stock holdings.

Although the figures above include the dividend earnings they do not reflect the cost of commission fees and taxes.  For 2012 I will apply my losses to offset the capital gains from MCD and AT&T.  The thing to remember and you hear it preached over and over again in every book you will read on responsible investing is that taxes and fees do add up and if you are consistently taking losses by selling at the wrong time you compound that problem and it’s not the compounding you want!

Although this represented a special case, it is not the kind of “churn” I want to see in my portfolio on a regular basis.  At the moment I’m fairly happy with my holdings other than NYCB which represents a large percentage of my entire portfolio.  I may sell half of it to diversify and decrease the risk associated with being so heavy in one stock.