My first pickup...

And with the first pick of my personal portfolio draft...the Evan Investment Fund selects...the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (enter rain of boos from the New York crowd)

Yes. That's right. It is the thing you hear all the time..."the Dow Jones is down 200 points today" or "the Dow Jones has rebounded quite nicely today with the news that..." Either way, it is in the news. And that's why I picked it. What better way to learn about the market than from the market itself?

So, I purchased ticker symbol "DIA" at $88 a share for 10 shares. That's almost a thousand dollars! (Yikes! This investing stuff just got real.)

For the sake of keeping everyone in the loop, let set some ground rules. I'm working up to investing around $10,000. That's a pretty standard amount for model portfolios and I think it is the hypothetical amount you are given in finance class when learning about investing. So that's what I'm working up to or around.

Back to the analysis: I picked up DIA at $88. Now my thinking is that the Dow Jones isn't a great investment to have all the time because it is so volitile . But I'm betting on the idea that the market is cyclical and I've hopefully bought in at a low point. It's like saying I invested in the NBA as a whole right after the strike of 1999. It's popularity was at an all time low...the loss of MJ and no basketball on TV for 7 months will do that. But then the NBA turned it around...Shaq, Kobe, Iverson, KG, the return of MJ, Lebron....Basketball is an entertaining sport and it is only a matter of time that people get over their hurt feelings and start watching again. Just like the market, after all this gloom and doom talk subsides and we've weathered the financial crisis, people are going to start buying again..right? Well that's what I'm assuming. And that's why I bought.

Future note: once the market gets running back up to speed, there is no way to say if profits are going to keep rising. There are just too many factors affecting the market as a whole. It is like saying I can predict the NBA's popularity year to year. No way. So hopefully, I'm going to get out when it is still on the rise a couple years from now.

However, with that said...I'd feel much better predicting that the Knicks will be popular in 2011. They'll spend boatloads of moola to get Lebron and who know's, maybe they'll be sitting pretty as the popular girl at the dance come 2011. And that is the type of investment I'll be looking for when I get out of DIA...but that's a story for a couple years from now. Right now? Well...my fifteen minutes of draft time are up...and that's my first pick. You're now on the clock and David Stern is waiting...