[thekremlin]

If anyone cares, here is what I have invested in. For the most part, I'm relatively conservative, and my portfolio doesn't fluctuate that much. I also manage a portfolio for my parents, and am more conservative with their money than I am with my own. So a few of the riskier stocks listed towards the bottom, they're not involved in, but the rest of it, our accounts are pretty similar.

The main thing is, I believe in stocks. I think the main question to ask when investing is, do I want to invest in stocks or bonds... and in this climate, the answer couldn't be more obvious. If you have a lot of wealth, it is legit to own some commodities too, or some other form of inflation hedge, but for most of us that isn't really the case. Outside of that, I think of commodities as speculation, which is fine, but not the same as investing.

I believe in stocks because they're basically pieces of companies, each company made up of people showing up every day and doing their jobs. Nothing fancy, but that's the edge. Over the (very) long term, you expect stocks to pay the same as the time value of money (by definition, I guess), but we're in a climate where money is easy to borrow, so doesn't pay off to lend. So I'm 0% in bonds.

My single largest holding, by far, is and has pretty much always been PFF, which FC mentioned above. It's a fund of preferred shares. The benefit of these shares is that they are the last shares that will go to 0 when a company has severe bankruptcy-type problems. When I first got involved in 2008, these shares were very deflated, because a lot of the holdings are financial stocks. But there was a reduced risk of extreme downside because of the preferred thing, and the dividend yield was ridiculous. Since then, we have come out of the financial crisis and the fund has more than doubled, meaning the yield has more than halved.... but it's still a very sexy 5.75%. Over the past year, it has traded in a very tight range, because the preferred shares start behaving a little more like bonds when we exit the risk zone. There is still the potential for growth, but not a lot. I just like the 5.75%, and it's risk I'm very comfortable with.

I own a lot of stocks that all share pretty much the same profile. Well-established companies across the sectors that pay dividends in the 2.5-5% range, with good cash flows and decent P/Es, and then I kind of pick my favorites from there. (What I tend to do is "get involved and see how it trades," basically own a smaller bit of the stock for a while to make myself follow it, then get into it heavier later.) The stocks in this group are the core: MO (altria), MRK (merck), HSY (hershey), XOM (exxon mobile), KMI (kimber morgan), a few others. I also own a small bit of plain old SPY (ETF on the S+P 500).

The stocks in this group have all done very well because they pay such predictable dividends, and in the climate of the past several years, that's what people want from their money. In addition to the dividends, they've had great growth: in the case of MO, it's pretty much doubled since I've gotten in. (To be fair, just about any stock you owned since the low of the financial crisis will have done well.) MO and MRK are my favorites of the list for what it's worth.

From there, I have some riskier stuff. Bank of America and Citibank were extremely risky a year ago, and still are but they've calmed down. FC has convinced me to be long AMZN. I tried to pick a low on Knight Capital, a trade which has not paid off and I will probably cut it as a 10% loser pretty soon. FC and I both got long Nokia, which paid off really well, although still has some volatility. These last two stocks are trades, rather than investments.

I stay away from superhyped stocks like AAPL and FB, although I do own Qualcomm, which can be very correlated with APPL.

Hope this was all helpful.