Oops! I Just Sold EFA
Well, you might remember I posted a while back about buying some shares in EFA, an ETF that focuses on stocks outside of the US. At the time, I though “Hey, I’ll set up a sell order with a limit of a 10% gain“. Well, in typical bonehead fashion, I forgot about it.
Today, I got an email saying I sold my shares of EFA.
The good: I made a gain of 10% on my money in a short period of time.
The bad: This was a dumb move. I haven’t changed my mind about the prospects of foreign stocks over the near future. With the falling of the US dollar (due to our gov’t borrowing so much money) and our recent slow down in the expansion of the US economy I still think it is wise to diversify outside of the US market. To top it off, my 10% gain wasn’t really even 10%.
On Feb 8th, I bought 14 shares of EFA @ $68.70 plus $12.99 commission, totaling $974.79. On April 7th, I sold those shares @ $75.57 minus 12.99 commission, totaling $1044.99. This left me with a before tax profit of $70.20 or a gain of only 7.2%.
While this isn’t too shabby, I’m not too happy with myself for letting it happen. Plus after this years tax return, I really didn’t want to have to worry about stock transactions for next year.
I’ve updated my stocks page that contains my current holdings since this has happened. You can check it out here.