All posts tagged: Lending

Hello everyone with an Investor’s Mindset!

Another two months have passed. Time really does fly… In Belgium we moved back into a semi-lockdown state with more strict rules. Which is the right choice in my opinion. So I’m back to working from home for at least another month now. Let’s hope this passes quickly. I hope all of you are staying safe!

So this is what I’ve been doing since the last update:

• Been going to the office again, was good to see some colleagues and catch up a bit
• Steadily invested €1000 in the stock market over the last two months. This brings my total up to €36000 invested currently
• Doing some more day trading. I moved away from going for 1 point scalp trades as the markets are usually too volatile. Instead I’m focussing on swing trading, on average going for a 1-to-1 risk/reward ratio aiming at $150 per trade. So far I went down quite a bit but managed to climb back up to break even yesterday. I’m proud to have not (yet) blown up my account where I invested €1000 in after 2 months.

Stock investing

Most of my stocks went up compared to two months ago. I went a bit more heavy in Communication for €1000, buying more shares of Orange (France) since they dipped below €10 per share again. This was done for averaging down, taking my negative 25% on the stock to negative 15%.

The other stock I purchased was Euronav, which has already given me a 12.5% gain in one month. I mainly went for them as they have a good balance sheet, good growth potential, nice dividend and they basically store & transport oil. Since oil prices are so low right now, many companies will be looking towards Euronav to store their oil, until prices go up again.

Also a nice milestone was reached, TSM is the first stock I had a 100% gain on! Unfortunately the two last days of the month were  mainly red days for my portfolio, so it dipped again slightly under. I might be tempted to sell & buy 2 new Dividend paying stocks, but in the case of TSM specifically I’m going to hold them. I just feel they haven’t reached their full potential yet, and they don’t really have any direct competition as a foundry for chipsets globally. So they will safely stay in my portfolio for sure.

Current value (including dividends & tax returns): €33,272.49. I currently have slightly over €600 idle in received dividends. I can’t wait for this to grow until €1000 by the end of the year. It will then be my first investment into a new stock purely on Dividend earnings. Letting earned money grow it’s own money, I’m sure that will be a great feeling & achievement!

Dividends

During August I will receive dividends from AT&T and Citigroup, both paying quarterly. Luckily, my portfolio was only hit with a couple of dividend cuts. Which overall makes me very happy.

I’m still down roughly €3000. Another stock market correction might be coming when Q3 or Q4 results are reported. For me, I’ll just keep on investing in Dividend stocks every month to grow the portfolio. Eventually the dividend gains will cover completely any losses of the portfolio. And they won’t be losses as long as I don’t sell… which I don’t really plan on doing in the next years.

Take care, stay safe & speak soon!

Kind regards,

Ken

Hello everyone with an Investor’s Mindset!

After a couple turbulent months earlier in the year followed by two months of not writing the blog, I decided it’s time for a change.

Over the last three months I kept track of my P2P portfolio, taking screenshots at the 1^st of every month to track the progression. It’s not moving much due to a lot of payment schedules being postponed because of the crisis. So I made in 3 months as much as I would have otherwise in 1 month (pre-Kuetzal & Envestio schandals).

So what have I done since the last update? Well a couple of things:

• Staying safe & staying at home
• Finished a huge project at work with a tight deadline whilst working from home. As this took a lot of my time (usually 14 hour working days) I just didn’t feel like blogging
• Focused more on stock investing, which means I have right now €34000 of my own money invested in individual stocks. I’m in the red, but that’s fine as this is also a long-term dividend investing strategy
• Started withdrawing most of my money out of Robocash. Whilst I believe in the platform and might consider going back -> I don’t think their buyback of the delayed loans is not sustainable in the longer term. And we all know this crisis could continue for a good while. I just don’t see them having enough money to cover everything for their investors
• Teaching myself with paper trading how to daytrade (scalping)

Stock investing

Seeing as I invest in large companies with a nice dividend, I’ve now broken €1500 in dividend payments per year, of which more than half of that is tax-free (per person). I’m quite happy with that, no matter what the market does! The portfolio has been hit only with a couple of dividend cuts so overall I’m very happy that most keep going strong.

So above is a first look at my portfolio. It’s a mix of European, US and Asian stocks. I’ve also tried to expose myself to as many markets as possible to keep a good diversified spread.

Below is my full list of stocks. I’m down still on most of them since I did most of the purchases last year and I’m trying to average down now each month:

Current value (including dividends & tax returns): €30,899.21

Dividends

The list is sorted on Dividend payment date, in case you were wondering, with this week NN, Orange & Pfizer incoming.

As you see I’m still down on most stocks. I do purchases every time with around €1000 plus the dividends I receive. The biggest torn in the portfolio is currently Wereldhave. Which makes sense as Mall REITs were hurt badly by the Covid-19 situation and they’ve paused their dividend. I’m sure all other stocks will eventually come back to the green. And in the meantime I’m just collecting the dividend payments.

For now I’ll try to keep investing whenever I receive my salary in the stock market. I also guess it only makes sense that I document this on the blog. No affiliates really connected to this – but that doesn’t matter. I keep this as a blog of my investment journey and I hope you like coming on this journey with me.

One affiliate program I’m still a member of I would like to mention. For all of us who sometimes send money internationally, Transferwise is a great, low cost option. So surely I can recommend you take a look and save a lot on bank/transfer fees + get a better conversion rate at the same time.

To end with, I’ll leave you with my most favorite website for tracking the stocks: Seeking Alpha.

They are not the best for tracking European stocks but therefor I use Google Finance and a Belgian website.

Take care, stay safe & speak soon!

Kind regards,

Ken

Hello everyone with an Investor’s Mindset!

The saying “when it rains, it pours” comes to mind if I have to sum up my investments so far in 2020. After losing €4000 on Kuetzal and Investio during January, the stock market market panic in February made my portfolio drop by another €3000.

But hey – all in all I see this as a good thing. It gave me perspective on how risky these alternative investment methods like P2P and crowdlending are. On the other hand I think it’s great the market went on sale right now as it made me invest another €6000 into my stock portfolio bringing up the total to €25000 invested there now. But first, my interest via Crowdinvesting for February;

Hello everyone with an Investor’s Mindset!

This is an update that I didn’t feel like writing due to the recent events in the P2P space. However I do feel, as a blogger, we need to write about the good and the bad. And when it rains, it pours if we look at both Kuetzal and Envestio in January.

Both platforms have been confirmed scams or Ponzi schemes recently. Kuetzal nearly on all loans, Envestio at least at some. In the mean time both platforms have completely gone offline and disappeared without additional communication.

That makes my table look a little something like this;