As you can probably tell, things have appeared quiet here for the past few weeks. This is due to several reasons. First, I am launching the new website at my company in three weeks, which has been a eight month project. So as you can imagine, the last three weeks are fairly hectic!

Second, to be honest, I just haven’t come across much newsworthy information on the personal finance or investment front recently. Sure, I could post about the dangers of credit cards, or how not buying coffee every day can save you one zillion dollars (check out KMC’s wonderful post about how this subject has been beaten to death), but I really feel as though those subjects have been squeezed dry by the personal finance blog community.

While I haven’t written about it much about it, you can believe that I’ve been following the stock market with a close eye ever since the massive drop in late July. However, I am happy to say that my tiny blip of a portfolio is doing wonderfully, up 14% since I started the portfolio over at Zecco on June 12.

So how’s an equal investment in the S&P 500 index, say the VFINX (Vanguard 500 Index fund) doing? It’s up 0.1%. In terms of real dollars, it’s up fifty-six cents since June 12th. My portfolio has gained $70. That means the portfolio is outperforming the index 125 fold. Not bad!

What does this mean? Am I the next Warren Buffet? Are index funds complete scams? I’d have to say a powerful “no” to both of those. First, a lot of my strong stock selection is thanks to the genius market analysts I work for at this investment advisory service, and I am lucky to get such information for free. Second, as you can see from the graph below my portfolio is extremely volatile, and a month or two ago I wouldn’t have been singing the same tune.

In any case, it’s incredible to see the difference between two hypothetical investments like this.

One last thing: I would like to thank everyone who remained subscribed to the RSS feed during the past few weeks. I had anticipated finding only two subscribers when I checked for the first time today (my wife and my mother of course), but instead there were even more than a few months ago. I appreciate it!