Replies to post #41495 on A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board (AIMUSERS)

[Toofuzzy]

HI Lou

Great questions.

1) you do not need any software. I keep track of everything on paper.
The hard part is the hold zone. I made the QUICK AIM CALCULATOR to figure out the HOLD ZONE so I don't have to do the calculations every month. Look at the pinned posts, if you can't find a good link, message again.Anyway I put the hold zone for all my securities on one index card.

2) Starting from scratch I like to use 50% cash, especially now with the market high.

3) I prefer regular Aim. 10% buy and sell safe and 5% minimum order size.

4) I like ETFS to trade better than funds as you know the price you are getting. You can own the same securities in both your taxable and sheltreed accounts but try and trade only the sheltered account. Make a list of all Vanguard ETFS and decide what you want to own THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. That MIGHT be large, small, foreign ,REIT, and that is it or you might own a few industry funds instead of the large cap fund. You don't NEED an allocation to bonds because AIM will have you own CASH and some of that can be put in bonds in the future when rates peak. I hate bonds at the present time, I just use the sweep MM account. It is there to be stable, not make money.

5) I just answered that. Cash is meant to be balast.

6) I LOOK at my account monthly. It is very rare that I will trade the same security a few months in a row.

7) like I wrote above you can hole a few of the securities in both accounts. Try to trade only in IRA except sales for spending money.

8) Aim will do better than the market in a down or flat market but worse in a screaming up market because of the cash it holds. It gives you disipline and takes the emotion out of investing. It is like rebalancing your account on steroids.

The above is just my opinions. There will be other points of view to the extent it will confuse you. One thing I will say, WHATEVER YOU DECIDE TO INVEST IN AND WHATEVER PERRAMERTERS YOU DECIDE TO USE, STICK WITH THEM . Aim is designed to take the emotion out of investing, if you keep switching things around, you are defeating the purpose. Aim takes a MINIMUM of one whole business cycle to see it working.

Hope that helps.

Toofuzzy

[Adam]

Hi Lou, I'll also add my thoughts based on personal experience and reading. Vanguard is excellent with its low cost ETFs for AIM. And I believe your trading costs are nil, which also helps remove on thing to worry about.

Avoid AIMing individual stocks. As Tom has pointed out, the v wave is too conservative, and a more realistic percent cash is to take the diversified V wave, which is 42.53 and divide by 1.4, which gives 30%. That's what I would use for your cash amount now. I keep one common cash pool for each account for all my AIM programs, and AIM each ETF individually. The UBH portfolio concept is great and works well with AIM. You can just use the some of the ETFs you hold right now to start Aiming. Start with Aiming the ETFs in your tax deferred account to avoid paying capital gains on each sell.

Use GTC orders especially on the sell side. Best bet to start is keeping the cash in a MM fund. This can also double as your emergency fund so you don't need a separate fund for that. Avoid a lot of small AIM programs.

For the arithmetic I use a spreadsheet that Tom has somewhere, it's called AIM Bare Bones or something like that, to which I added 3 columns to tell me the hold zone, with the buy, sell, and hold zone %.

One other thing. I think most of us have learned to take the dividends as cash and let AIM direct the reinvesting.

Adam