Re-shuffling The Portfolio

I've made a small change to the portfolio, partly due to the current rally and partly to my discovery of the "Dogs of the Dow" trading strategy.

First change was to sell Apple. It might seem nuts but my thinking is this: Apple is very dependant on consumer spending and even though the market is doing well these days and almost everything is going up in price, I don't think we're over the worst yet. The US consumer has only just begun to pull back spending, as I see it, and they will soon realize that there is no more cheap credit to be had, and that they can't keep spending like they've done the last many years. To make matters worse, I don't believe this will be contained to the US but will spread to the rest of the world slowly but surely. Things are already starting to slow down in Euro-land and the UK (the two markets I'm looking at besides the American) and these two markets haven't even been hit that hard by falling house prices - yet.

So all in all, when I saw I could lock in a 25% profit on my Apple shares I decided to take the profit and place it somewhere that's not as exposed to consumer spending.

Next was the usual question of where to place the freed up capital. Having read/heard about the Dogs of the Dow somewhere, I had a closer look at the idea and liked what I read. It's quite different to what I've tried to do previously, but to not put all my money in penny stocks, I thought it would be a good strategy for "securing" growth in the portfolio. I ended up buying Pfizer as they were the cheapest of the top 10 and also the one with the highest possible yield, based on calculations from today. Only time will tell if this is a wise move, but at least these guys plan on paying dividends...