August purchases & App I use

13 shares of Chevron (CVX) (Energy)
15 shares of Fastenal (FAST) (Industrial)

CVX and XOM are at all time lows.  They may even dip lower due to Hurricane Harvey, but their returns are fantastic.  My account jumped about $50 a year with the chevron purchase.  Fastenal is my first foray into Industrial.  It is a bit cyclical, but with the repairs in Texas, infrastructure development on the horizon, and of course the tax breaks which will help all our stocks, I feel this is a good buy.  Grainger is listed as Industrial, but they seem too much like retail to me.  FAST has some wholesale aspects as well as retail, but since they are manufacturing as well, it was more attractive.  I hope to get at least one more in each sector, XOM seems the most solid and likely one in the energy sector, although VLO is attractive as well.  For industrial, I'll just wait and see.

I want to share an App that I use that is very good for tracking real-time stocks on my tablet and phone.  It is called My Stocks Portfolio, and is worth paying the guy for it (to turn off ads).  Check it out and let me know if there's anything better out there.  It allows for watchlists, but I use my broker for that because it has more research data.  However, since my broker doesn't provide me with real-time data (15 minute delay), this works just fine.

September is historically a bad month for stocks, and with the Korean/Harvey news, this month may not surprise us.  It is possible that Trump has waited until this month to push tax reform based on the reason of history, so people will be more accepting of it, but only time will tell.  I am trying to make some financial decisions as well.  I am in a position to pay off my 401k loans to have about 16% more come to me in my paycheck, or I could just take this disposable capital and invest it in dividend stocks which makes it more readily available if I needed to pull it out.  I am of the mind that bringing home more money will help me make wiser, smaller decisions over time with investments, but it irks me that once I put that money into my 401k (which will happen eventually anyway as I pay off the loans) I can't touch it anymore.  Frozen assets :)  I will wait and see if the tax cuts happen and when they take effect.  Trump could use Harvey to make tax cuts retroactive to this year, but of course he will be criticized for politicizing the tragedy, so for PR reasons he may not.  It would take someone else to suggest it and take the heat for it to be pushed ahead.  But I digress.  I will be updating my graphs by the closing bell today.