Thursday, February 1, 2018

Twenty-three Percent Profits Last Year

Last year was a good year. No I am not talking about tires on the road, though I did go on a 16 state, 6,000 mile roadtrip from California to Illinois and back via the Grand Canyon, the hot and humid Midwest and the Great Salt Lake.

The last year from February 1, until January 31 2018 has seen my portfolio grow by a decent 23%.

This was almost all due to prudent re-balancing at the beginning of the period and then just leaving things alone. No trading for the most part.

Remember trading costs money and that can quickly burn away any profits.

I did take some profits, for instance recently I trimmed back on Starbucks to leave me  holding a small number. This rump of shares  will keep me interested in the company but I have now removed all my original investment.

As you might say, the remaining stock is house money  and I see no harm in letting the house money ride in this case.

I also added a little cash to buy in Boeing (BA) back in August when the stock was hovering around the $100 mark. I liked it because of the name, it is an engineering specialist with a good track record across several core competances, Aerospace and defence to name just two. So that was a nice little punt, which has paid big bucks subsequently.

I also held my favorite bank ETF and utillities. Giving a reasonable return on investmen.

Walt Disney (DIS) also saw some weakness at varying time over the year and allowed me to increase some of my holdings in that company as it fell into the nineties.

Most of the other gains were in the area of re-invested dividends. My average dividend yield last year was 2.15% Enough to give a inflation beating return in cash.