Dividend increases from my holdings have been coming in over the past 2 months like clockwork. So much so that I can already tell I should be able to reach my forecasted dividend income for 2019 at $22,360. The forecasting is based on the annual average growth since 2010. Part of the growth includes new contributions but the other part is based on the dividend growth itself.
Stock Trades
I decided to completely unload Saputo and focus on Alimentation Couche-Tard. With Metro, I felt I had enough exposure to the grocery market. The reason for the trade was mostly based on not being satisfied with the performance of SAP in my account and believing ATD.B should perform better. The dividend income is reduced but that’s not the focus at this point for the portfolio.
I have also unloaded my only real estate stock. Goodbye Brookfield Property Partners and hello Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. I also added to BlackRock and MasterCard. I have been going through my holdings and reviewing the reasons I hold them. I did not have a reason good enough to retain BPY.UN. I used the ever-faithful DLR to DLR.U Norbert Gambit strategy to exchange my Canadian dollars for the US purchases.
Feel free to check out my trades for January if you missed them. I have a total of 29 different holdings – 13 Canadian Blue Chip stocks, 15 US Conglomerates and 1 index ETF.
Sector Diversification – February 2019
The sector allocation is pretty out of control. Not to be missed opportunities have shifted the ratios and I do not have any plans to correct it in the short term. I am now sharing my industry exposure to properly show my diversification as many would probably feel I have too much in the financial sector.
Dividend Income
My February 2019 dividend income is $1,766. More dividend increases have come through for the next quarter. I should see the increases next quarter. It took me a while to switch my portfolio to dividend growth but as I hope you can see, the annual dividend growth from my holdings is really supercharging my dividend income.
Dividend growth will leave inflations behind and provide my financial freedom to spend more.