Summary of July 2014

July has been a month filled of sun, swimming in the ocean and generally enjoying life being on vacation. The costs for this vacation has been lowered by few visits to restaurants and instead we have loved the possibility of making BBQ almost every day and have therefore also made those and loved the taste of it. A friend of mine that came to visit brought some wood for smoking meat and we have tried that with both pork, beef and salmon. In each case it worked very well and the flavour was excellent!


As tradition holds I have worked on the summer house. We washed the entire wooden deck with caustic soda to remove the algae. Next year we will have to oil it in again. Mowed the lawn, cut the hedges to the neighbours and other bushes that were simply out of order. Cleaned the gutters and replaced parts. Cleaned out the shed that was completely clogged with junk so that all the bicycles did not even fit any longer. Cut down branches on some trees and wanted to cut down one entire tree but got scared in the end since it is standing in between electrical cables and if it falls in the wrong direction those cables might be busted. Repaired two bicycles and will take one of them back to Berlin. I leave the failed Dutch bicycle here since my bank did not help me out and it is ok to use it a couple of weeks during summer but not possible to use during all year in rain or snow and ice.

We or better put my girlfriend decided to try to bring out the stone paths that we have around the house. We then discovered that it was not only one row of stones making the path but there were actually three and in one case even four stones broad which created the path. Many of them were sticking out in a dangerous way due to tree roots so also the axe had to be brought out to remove the roots and to place back the stones in the "correct" position. That gave us two lost days of extremely hard work. Sure it looks good but I am not sure it was worth it.

There has also been some heavy fighting with a squirrel that have been living under our roof for the last 1,5 years. I put up chicken nets all around the roof to prevent it from entering. It did not like that and has been throwing nuts on me ever since! I even had to run out there 5 o'clock in the morning to prevent it from getting in.

I was also happy to see that my silicon reparation of the gaps between the chimney and the roof still holds after three years running. My dad used to be up there every year with some ugly tar thing to plug the gaps. It held one season but never managed to survive the heat changes from winter to summer and those tar roofs get really hot during summer.

There are still three major concerns with the house:

All the big trees we have around it. We need to cut all of them down, plant some nice fruit trees and then leave it at that and never allow a tree to get higher than that we can not do it ourselves since it is a garden and not a forest property we talk about here.
The main water pipe is dripping water. At one point we were loosing 1.1 L water per hour with this dripping and after some adjustments we now only loose around 0.2 L per 12 hours but it is unacceptable that the pipes are dripping so we need to correct this ASAP.
The final thing and to me it is the biggest concern is the amount of moisture that we have in the basement. There is so much that if any object is even slightly colder than everything else then there directly is a condensation of water that then drops down on the floor. Something needs to be done and I fear that three things need to be done. Digging up two different sides of the house and to protect the those walls from external water. And the final one is to find a much better solution for the drainage of the water from the roof.

Sooo... down to business... I managed to make an investment during the month so that was indeed good news! Now we just have to keep that up!

The new investment became IBM and you can find more here in analysis of IBM 2014. I have by now managed to push in 40,937 € into the companies that you can see in the pie chart above.

As can be seen two pieces in the pie chart above are too small for my liking with only 3%. IBM is ok since I just started up that position but Asian Bamboo is not ok. However due to incompetent management no further investments will be made in Asian Bamboo. The current value right now is 38,378 € which means that I am -6% in comparison to my investment which is seriously bad but nothing unusual for me by now. Just do not buy what I buy and you should be fine!

DAX performed very poorly during July and dropped with over -3.1% and are now down at 9594. My own investment dropped by -1% during July so this time I beat DAX again. The gap between us is however still extreme with DAX being +38% and me being -6%.

For the full portfolio report please go to the Stock Portfolio page and if you have suggestions for stocks that I should analyse then please go to the Analysis Requests page.