Summary of October 2014

October turned out to be an interest month and the stock market made a nice dip down by around -15% which made me grab a nice DAX company that I have for some time wanted to own stocks in. The stock market is more or less back to where it was before the dip happened. It is indeed fascinating to see the roller coaster go up and down.



My latest investments have done seriously bad. I once again proved that I am excellent in my timing of picking stocks. Eniro crashed like a bomb since they decided that there was apparently not 1.7 billion SEK in value as they have claimed besides from the previous CEO being reported to the police for breaking the accounting rules...

Fugro has crashed with over -50% which comes from a bad quarter but the major reason for the crash is due to them deciding to cut dividends and since they are (were is maybe a better word to use) having several funds as investors. Funds tend to have autopilot rules for how to handle cutting of dividends which is usually sell, sell, sell. Part of the reason why also I bought Fugro was due to the nice dividends so now I am also double slammed with -50% on my buy price and no dividends paid out for 2014. Sigh...

IBM also made a crash and dropped down by around -15% due to a poor third quarter report and they even paid a company off to take over one of their final hardware businesses.

Privately life has been good. My weight keep decreasing due to my three fast days per week, 80 minutes of bicycle and 30 minutes walking per day and I am now below my target weight and I will move further with only two fast days per week so my food bill will increase slightly in the future which is bad but still acceptable with my made up food budget.

I still have not received the money back from my private health insurance (a bit over 1,000 euro) so I have still not managed to make the extra investment that I wanted to do with that money. This annoys me and soon I will go after them to reclaim that money faster. There are currently two companies that I know will ask for money pretty soon (Asian Bamboo and Tessenderlo) and I would not be chocked of also Eniro will decide to print some new stocks... Tessenderlo I will directly push more money into and with Asian Bamboo and Eniro I really do now know what to do.

My own company had a couple of busy weeks in October with plenty of orders that had to be custom made. It is always risky to sell custom made products since it makes the price and time calculation difficult. Too high (as well as too long time) and the customer walks away. Too low and you end up with higher costs than what comes in, especially if the slightest complication appears. Over time one gets better and better at making those kind of calculations but it is never easy and it became a couple of 16 hour days for me to get the job done but since it will pay the salaries in the company for the next three months it was worth it.

For the previous summary report please click on summary of September 2014.

The only major addition that happened was that I jumped in with an investment in BASF (see analysis of BASF 2014). This meant that the total invested value increased with a bit over 2,000 € and is now up at 48,259 €.

There were a lot of bad news in October as has been described above already. Even though a massive amount of cash has been pushed into the portfolio during the last two months the current value is still only at 43,102 € which means that I am down by -11% (-5,157 €) compared to my invested value.

DAX has since the peak in June/July kept going down while I was running more flat but this month that turned and DAX is now down at 9271 which means -1.2% compared to last month. My stock portfolio on the other hand went down with -3.9% month to month so DAX won October.

Conclusion: I keep having massive fluctuations in my stock portfolio and since the October dip DAX has more or less recovered which my portfolio has not done the same and I keep being amazed at how little it takes to make a company drop by -50% or more as Fugro just did.

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.