Sunday 4 March 2018

Summary of February 2018

Summary of February 2018

February was again a highly interesting month in terms of the stock market. Share prices dropped and there are opportunities for buying high quality companies cheap at this moment. I have, not by own experience but instead learnt by listening to others and thinking about it, realised that I will never be able to time the market movement and are therefore not even attempting to sell any shares during drops such as this one. It is instead a good moment for buying more shares. Due to the bonus that I received in January I had a bit of firepower and I ended up buying two falling knives that, of course, have continued to fall but it is of little concern to me.

I decided to increase my monthly savings in the company pension scheme and from now on I will save around 1k GBP per month into index funds. These investments are not accounted for here but it also means that I will be able to save slightly less privately especially now since I alone are carrying all the costs once again as I did in the beginning of this UK adventure. I think that I will be able to save around 1.5k per month outside of the company pension scheme which is still higher than the 1k € per month that I have in my plan but 500 € less than what I would like to invest per month.

Work is going very well but I must start to focus on sending out applications. It will take time to find a new job and I have made a vertical career step so it is time for another horizontal move. The mixed emotions of this having the potential to make me hit financial jackpot due to stock options are preventing me from fully devoting my time to find something new as well as my teams being such excellent and wonderful people to work with every day. It is hard, very hard to make that very final decision and I am very clearly not yet there.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of January 2018 and here you can see my stock portfolio as it is.

Invested versus Current February 2018

The total invested value is now up at: 109,855 €. During the month of February I decided to pick up more of the falling dagger H&M as well as ETF Oil which was not a falling dagger but very quickly became one.

Current investments in February 2018

The value of the portfolio is today: 113,333 € and spread out I now have around 5,652 € in cash on the different accounts. I have a realised gain of 2,857 € and the combined realised and unrealised gain is now at: 3,478 € (3%) which is not good at all but the entire market has dropped so not much to do about it unless one attempts to time the market movements which I do not.

Me versus DAX during February 2018

DAX dropped down a little during the month to 11,914 points which means that the it decreased by -6.8% which is worse than my portfolios drop of "only" -6.2%.

Conclusion: It is probably a good moment to go shopping and I hope that the investments that I made in February will turn out to be ok over time. Both, very large, investments that I made in February continued down after I had bought them which no one will be surprised about. My portfolio decreased slightly less than DAX, which is good, but it is a marathon and not a sprint as we all know. 

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