July 2016 Dividends

The month of July has now ended and I am taking the opportunity to write a quick review of the performance achieved.

As anticipated in June, July has been my best month to date and I am quite proud to show my results.

During July I received the following dividends:

Porsche PAH3 05/07/2016 £18.70
Coca Cola KO 12/07/2016 £9.16
New York Mortgage Trust NYMT 27/07/2016 £31.10

This brings the total dividends for the month to £58.96!. These values are of course after tax.

The 2016 performance YTD is as follows:

As you can see July is my best month to date by a wide margin, I could not be more satisfied of my overall performance! Obviously I will try to keep the trend going and try to beat the new record.

Lastly, let's take a look at the cumulative performance for the whole year.

Not bad at all, my snowball is gaining good momentum!

This is it for the moment, thanks for reading.
Yours,

The Gentleman Investor

First Half Year financial review (HY16)

Welcome to my H1 2016 review.
The first half of the year has gone and it is now time to review the performance of my net worth and holdings for the first 6 months of 2016.


Dividends received to date

How am I doing financially?

Sometimes I find myself reviewing my objectives and achievements. When it happens, I think it can be difficult to determine a proper benchmark to use as a term of comparison, to understand if my performance is either good or bad for example.

In this article I will try to address this issue and offer several methodologies which may help answering the critical question: how I am doing financially?

GDP per capita (2016)

First, let me offer a look at the world's GDP per capita chart.

GDP per capita in the World (2016 data)

As you may know from my 'About' page, I currently live in the UK.
The GDP per capita in this country is $42,105 for 2016.
Also, let's have a look at the evolution of GDP per capita in the UK over time:

My July watchlist

For the last couple of months I have been working on a nice spreadsheet on Google Sheets to help me model the fair price for a my stock watch list and, combining this to several criteria, tell me when some of the names in my basket have reached a buying point.

During the last couple of weeks I have been keeping a close eye on:

June 2016 Dividends

The month of June has now ended and I am taking the opportunity to write a quick review of the performance achieved.

During June I received the following dividends:

June 2016 portfolio update

June 2016 has been a crucial month for my strategy and annual objectives.

June represents the second month after I decided to maximise the ISA allocation for the current tax year (£15,240).
Well, I couldn't be more pleased to share with you my latest additions to my portfolio!

The June 2016 additions to my portfolio:

Strategy revision ahead of Brexit vote - end of June 2016

For those who started following me in my exciting journey, you will know that I always have a plan for the future. Recently I had the opportunity to explain my thoughts on Brexit and how this historical decision may affect my personal finances.

The conclusions of my analysis is that it is wise to adopt a conservative approach given the great uncertainty surrounding the future months. It would be better to hold on to the money right now and see what will happen next. After all, the referendum is just few weeks away and it does not make any sense to rush through investments for the moment. It is exactly in these conditions that one may be led to make big mistakes which may become a regret in the future.

Black Tuesday (29.10.1929). Are we heading in that direction?

My plan is to slow down until September, which is not a random month...indeed September is generally considered a bearish month, as you can read in this article from Investopedia.

So, when we take into account the high level of uncertainty surrounding the future, plus the need to reinforce my cash position due to the recent investments and the fact that we have a nice bearish month coming in the near future, I think my new contingency plan will be quite effective!
By end of August-September I should be in a much better position to exploit any opportunity on the horizon.

September is generally considered a bearish month for investors.

In my review for the end of the month I will update my net worth and take a look at how this contingency plan will affect my overall wealth distribution.

Yours,

The Gentleman Investor

Few words on Brexit

Right now there is a lot of debate on Brexit, as you can imagine.
It is not my intention to express a political view with this post, I am not going to talk about immigration (I feel I can't really have a say on that one), nor will I talk about what is best for the UK economy.

I'll simply try to be as objective as it is possible for an Italian investor living in the UK and try to understand what the impact might be on my portfolio.

Before we start, please allow me to say that I am undeniably a bit scared by the outcome of all of this. As a European citizen living in Great Britain, my future is at stake and I won't even get a chance to officially express my idea through my vote.

But let's get started with the analysis. As an investor, I realise that this event will be the main catalyst of change for years to come and, possibly, great opportunities. There are clearly two main scenarios depending on the vote result.


Scenario 1. The UK ends up voting to leave the EU. 

Uncertainty about the financial future of the nation and about foreign investments - which may be blocked as a result of the vote - will cause the GBP (£) to take the hit, dropping to all time low against the Euro. Forecast is in fact it will get close to parity with the Euro, or even lower.

May 2016 portfolio update

May 2016 has been a crucial month for my strategy and objectives.

As a matter of fact, it's only a month ago that I decided I wanted to maximise the ISA allocation for the current tax year (£15,240).

The same month, I also decided to open this club. Sharing my progress and achievements openly is already getting me closer to my goals.

The May 2016 additions to my portfolio:

New 2016 Objectives: June review

As anticipated in my previous post, I have decided to review my 2016 objectives.

This is because two of my original annual objectives have already been achieved!

For this reason, my revised objectives are: