Investing has been pretty simple this year for me. Keep to the plan with some consolidation.
With the markets so high, I think it’s hard for many to avoid trying to make it big with bitcoins or other strategies. There is a lot of FOMO when you hear stories. It’s important you know yourself and your investing skills.
I also feel it’s critical you know exactly how your portfolio is performing. To date, I have not seen a single discount broker properly showing the performance of a portfolio.
Some have decent performance monitoring for an account with an index as benchmark but overall you can’t see it across your overall portfolio or even per investment.
You want to track the performance at your investment level, your account level and your portfolio level. I did that with my portfolio tracker and it allowed me to significantly improve my portfolio performance.
Stock Trades
These days, you probably noticed more trades with my non-dividend stocks. I let myself have about 10% of non-dividend stocks with Disney being close to 4%. It used to pay a dividend but I don’t see it doing so for a while but I like the growth potential from Disney+.
With that said, I decided to drop Facebook and replace it with Amazon recently. I did well with Facebook. I had a 30% annual return for the 3 years I held it. Why Amazon? There is a new CEO and Prime Video is undervalued in my opinion while the AWS business is a cash cow.
I sold my Fortis (a tiny position) and I added Manulife as an income play as it was up in the Dividend Snapshot Screener and it was mentioned by a couple of Stock Analysis featured on BNN. The yield was higher than historical trends as was the PE which are two signs I like for an entry.
Portfolio Management
I have only added $12,000 to our portfolio which is the TFSA contribution for both accounts. This is partly why there aren’t many transactions aside from investing the leftover cash from dividends not re-invested.
In short, my portfolio is a machine that’s running on its own now.
One big news is that I have moved all my trading accounts to RBC now that I have $6.95 trades. I am closing my Questrade and CIBC Investor’s Edge accounts. It simplifies everything.
| wdt_ID | Dividend | No Growth | < 6% Growth | > 6% Growth | > 10% Growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | None | 7.10 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| 3 | Yield < 2% | 3.28 | 0.00 | 12.06 | 36.75 |
| 4 | Yield > 2% | 0.00 | 0.00 | 3.70 | 5.43 |
| 5 | Yield > 4% | 0.00 | 0.00 | 26.45 | 0.00 |
| 7 | Yield > 6% | 0.00 | 0.00 | 4.93 | 0.00 |
Dividend Income
My September 2021 dividend income is $1,234. Nothing impressive here. The monthly income distribution pattern for my portfolio is like a roller coaster now.
Part of my success is focusing on companies that operate like Tollbooth. While dividend income is not the priority today, dividend growth is!
In the accumulation years, my approach is dividend growth investing to grow my portfolio to the biggest I possibly can. At the point of retirement, I switch my portfolio to a dividend income portfolio.