Even though economy is doing bad and recently there was a huge drag on the stock market somehow I managed to get away with more than 30% return in last two months.

In January I bought SLB, Visa, GE & GLD.

Why I bought them?
Since economy was not in a great condition and sub prime mess still fresh I thought buying oil service company and Gold would be a nice idea as no matter what they will do good in rising inflation and uncertainty. So I bought SLB (SCHLUMBERGER) and GLD (Street Smart Gold ETF).

I bought GE as I was hoping like any other market analyst for GE to do better than other companies because of a very well diversified company and having more than 40% of the revenue coming from overseas market.

And Visa was not at all a brainer. It just completed and IPO and it's shares were hot.

Unfortunately GE didn't do well in last 2 months and reported loss making Share prices go down. I suffered 6% loss on it and I sold them all. I hope GE's price to fall further in coming months of 2008.

GLD was another sad story as FED's interest rate cut brought the gold prices down from upper 900. I believe in the gold prices going up in the long run but I sold the shares to avoid more losses.

SLB and Visa got me more than 30% return and I decided to sell them to realize some gains.

Finally I ended up having a gain of around 30% when the market was shaky and everyone was jittery.

I am hunting for stocks again and will post my findings as soon as I make some positions over them.

Since stock picking takes time and lots of efforts I would advise general investor to stick to low cost index fund unless they have time and energy to research about the stocks. I definitely lost my sleep a few nights wondering if I would lose all the money.