The portfolio changes:
↑ Accumulate additional $3,500
as part of my annual savings plan ($42,000 a year or $3,500 a month)
↑ Annual bonus added towards financial independence
investment - $10,000
↑ EUR is up towards USD – 1,581 USD
Grand total
additions: $15,081 USD
↓ Vanguard Energy ETF stocks are
down $1,300
↓ Gazprom and Company
shares are down $4,490 combined
↓ Emerging market mutual funds are down $1,980
↓ Precious metals down $970
↓ RUB and GBP are down to USD, causing loss combined 1,871
USD
Grand total
losses are $10,611 USD
I did some
shopping by buying:
-
200 Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) shares at
total price of $14,300
-
2,000 Rosneft (OJS1:FRA) shares, following my
Energy stock analysis at total price of
$13,900
-
1,600 Gazprom (GAZ:FRA) shares. The company is at
its lowest price in a while. Dividends are expect to be 4-5% and the long term
growth prospect.
Observations:
-
Gazprom stock is being heavily speculated on.
Couple of years ago the company would worth 3 times more. Fundamentally it
hasn’t changed – strong resource base and good dividends. Good thing about it –
being a state controlled it is not moved by dividend growth seekers. Many
companies start compromising their investment strategies, paying the dividends
instead. This would affect so called total shareholder return (dividends +
difference is share price in a given period). Gazprom continues heavily invest
in future growth, only next year alone proposed investment programme is over
$44bn.
-
While keeping my nest egg in different currencies
has its advantages – keeping it balanced, downside of it keeps losing money
right now, as USD is relatively strong.
-
I invested in Vanguard S&P at the market
peak, while many a waiting for a correction (~10%). The reason and missing the bull was entirely
personal and done for sanity of mind. No
regrets there.
-
Still over 43% of my nest egg is in cash. I will
aim to reduce it to 25% by end of the year.
I can understand how balancing multiple currencies can be difficult. Having some liquid money on hand is pretty smart in case a great opportunity comes along :D But I agree that you shouldn't need more than 25% of your assets in depreciating paper money. Do you have any plans to deploy your extra cash or are you waiting for a meaningful correction in the stock market first?
ReplyDeleteHi Liquid,
ReplyDeleteOn my way to financial independence it is exactly what I did. There is a quite fine balance between investing in retirement oriented portfolio and financial independence one. I deployed all of my cash and now need to start re-building my emergency fund %-)
You see, market correction will unlikely to help the financial independence, as such. More over, I think that people and institutions were sitting for such a long time on piles of cash, that they will keep on putting in stocks, in spite the fact that they overvalued and dividends payouts are going down by a year.