Portfolio Update: November 2018

We’ve reached December so it’s time to look back again, time for yet another portfolio update. It’s amazing how fast November has passed. That’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s like I published my last update only days ago. Yet here we are: Another month has gone by.

October was gruesome. Well, that’s perhaps an overstatement, but across the board equities dropped quite significantly. And my company stock was no exception. I was hit pretty hard, although my overall net worth dropped by only 1%.

As we entered November, I was pretty confident that the market would show strong recovery. What happened in October was due to the October Effect and the midterm elections in the US (early November). November would be much calmer I figured.

But it didn’t quite go like that. Initially. November continued to be very volatile and at some point my company stock declined for 5 days in a row (another 10% in addition to the October loss). After every decline I thought ‘this must be the lowest it can get’, only to drop even further the next day.

To be honest, it was hard not to get slightly anxious each time another drop occurred. I didn’t lose any sleep over it, but I did check the stock price a bit less often.

After the declines however, a rally followed. This past week. And the company share landed even slightly above October’s price. That’s what I call a happy ending to what looked like to become another dramatic month.

Apart from the volatile markets, it has been an interesting and productive month. I expanded my crowdlending investments and published a bunch of posts on the website.

But let’s have a look at the numbers.

November 2018

Income

The income looks like this:

Company shares

As you can see, the company shares produced a pretty decent increase in capital gain. It is not erasing the losses in October, but it is good to see things are ‘stabilizing’.

Below is a chart with the month on month income. Overall it is still looking good. Note that the loss in July 2018 is artificial as I sold a fair amount of shares, but left the invested amount untouched (this affected the capital gain obviously).

Crowdlending

I further increased my investments in loans on Mintos (crowdlending platform) and got my first tangible return. It has been re-invested automatically using Mintos’ auto-invest feature, so I just sit back and relax and watch my money work for me.

Portfolio

My portfolio is slowly adapting a second color in addition to blue (company shares) and that’s great. Diversification is high on my agenda as my portfolio is simply too concentrated.

At present I invest approximately 75% of my monthly available funds in company stock and 25% in crowdlending.

Overall, the portfolio remains very blue (company stock), but it’s slightly better than last month, with now 3.4% invested in non-correlated (alternative) assets (Mintos). This was 2.7% last month.

Not reflected in the above portfolio is the equity I hold in my home, which is approximately $300K. I do consider this to be part of my assets.

Net worth

My total net worth is as follows:

Mortgage-free home	$300K
Company shares	$57,704.70
Crowdlending	$2,046.59
Liabilities	$31K
Net worth	$328,751.29

That’s a small increase of $1.704,62 (0.5%) compared to October 2018.

Blog

I published a decent amount of posts. Some of the highlights are:

Mintos Auto Invest Explained

Why Invest In Index Funds?

Thought Experiment: What Would You Do If You Knew With Absolute Certainty That You Would Die In Exactly 10 Years Time?

The last one is the second installment of SavingNinja’s thought experiments. I can’t wait for the next one!

Plans for December

My plans for December:

• Keep the ESPP program running
• Continue to invest on Mintos – a minimum of $500
• Open accounts on other crowdlending platforms (I already wanted to do that in November, but lacked the funds)
• Invest on Envestio (crowdfunding)
• Write, write, write

That’s all for this time!