At the end of 2017, I was doing some last minute rebalancing of my retirement accounts. The stock market has been going crazy. By “the stock market”, I mean something different than what you are probably thinking.

The United States stock markets did really well in 2017. Depending on the index, they went up 20% or so. However, Personal Capital seemed to show those markets up 28% for the year.

To quote the Lego movie, everything is awesome. However, things were so awesome that my portfolio needed some minor adjusting. Another good reason to do trades at this time of year is that my stock ETFs paid their dividends. Why not put those dollars to work?

During the process, I decided it was time to invest in a new stock. I had been toying with the idea of investing in it for a couple of weeks. However, I was already logged in and making trades, so what’s one more?

As you may be able to tell from the article’s title, I invested in General Electric. Hopefully, I’m not showing my age too much with the title.

I was fortunate to get a price of $17.4647. (To really show my age, I remember when stock prices were traded in fractions. Now they are trading at four decimal places?)

I wish I could say that I had some great insight into why I bought GE. I can say that I read this Seeking Alpha article
and this one
and this one. There was a lot of compelling information there. Perhaps the most compelling reason was that GE was trading at it’s lowest point in years. There’s certainly some good reason for that, and those Seeking Alpha cover them in better detail than I can.

GE feels like a stock that I could buy and hold for years and years.

It’s been less than two weeks and I’m already wondering if I should sell it. I’m mostly joking, but it’s gone up 9%. If only one could make 9% returns every two weeks, right?

If you read my post about my clicked to look at the spreadsheet, you’ll notice that I have %high and %low in the watchlist tab. That’s so I can see how close a stock is to trading at its 52-week high and how close it is to its 52-week low. I don’t suggest that anyone use these exclusively when picking stocks, but I’ve found them helpful when I’m looking for a bargain stock.

My original plan was to hold GE for a quarter or two to assess how the turnaround of the business is going. My hope is that it has a chance to get to $24 which would be halfway to it’s former high. At around that point, I’d use what new information I have consider whether I should take the profit and move on, or just hold onto it forever.