Happy new year to everyone.

202 has definitely been challenging mentally as normal day-to-day habits were upended along with the challenges from being separated from friends and families. Moreover, some families have had hardship due to health impact. I sympathize with you all and I wish you a much better year ahead. Stay strong.

On the economic front, while all signs were pointing towards a recession prior to the pandemic, the arrival of the virus has certainly been a catalyst for many changes in the investing world.

I want to remind investors that while a pandemic is a one in a life time event, stock market crashes or pull backs are more prevalent. In fact, recessions are cyclical and that’s why we classify sectors as cyclical and defensive due to their behaviours during recessions and market pullbacks.

See below for all the stock market pullbacks since 2009. You need to be ready for one at any point without sacrificing growth and that’s why you need to know why you own a stock and do a portfolio stress-test.

Historical Stock Market Performance — Source: J.P. Morgan Asset Management

, and Brookfield Infrastructure are gone from my portfolio. I simply could not understand the valuation of the new BIPC vs BIP.UN and in the end, I simply don’t understand the company structure overall. Add to this all the other companies and it’s complicated. Since I always recommend knowing and understanding the companies you invest in and I cannot easily explain Brookfield, I decided to make money elsewhere.

With the funds I had, I purchased the following stocks which was mostly adding to existing holdings.

Canadian National Railway
Intact Financial
Apple
Microsoft
Visa
The Walt Disney Company
ISHARES NASDAQ 100 INDEX ETF CAD HEDGED
Twilio
Amazon

My 5% of millionaire makers is set now. I also drop all Enbridge from my RRSP account. It broke even after 10 years including DRIP shares and I don’t need the income at the moment.

I also dropped all of my Cisco as a failed 5G investment.

Overall, the impact is a lower expected annual dividend for 2021 today but I expect the dividend growth and new capital will bring me back up.

Portfolio Management

This is how my holdings are spread across the dividend yield and dividend growth now. To date, almost 55% of my holdings are in USD. The Canadian market has limited options that can easily be complemented with ETFs.

wdt_ID	Dividend	No Growth	> 6% Growth	> 10% Growth
2	None	7.10	0.00	0.00
3	Yield < 2%	3.28	12.06	36.75
4	Yield > 2%	0.00	3.70	5.43
5	Yield > 4%	0.00	26.45	0.00
7	Yield > 6%	0.00	4.93	0.00

Disney is the outlier and increasing my no dividend holdings. It used to pay a dividend semi-annually and it is suspended now. Since I have almost 5% in DIS, it bumps the no dividend grouping.

I don’t expect Disney to pay a dividend until the parks are fully open and back to normal whenever that is.