Summary of August 2016

I get more and more into the technical part of my new job and it is working pretty well. In the meantime I still manage to advice on what needs to be done in most of the projects that we have with only one project... our biggest one... being still a bit of a black hole to me which comes more from the companies interaction with customers than what it has to do with the technical part of the project. I learn, I adapt and I move forward.

In my old company, that I still am a major shareholder in, I have to admit that I no longer keep track of what the CEO is doing. I guess I will start to ask for quarterly updates but my guess is that it will be closed down before the end of this year since he showed no interest when I was running it and I doubt that his level of interest will kick up to actually make things happen. Still... then in two years from now I will get some money out of it of which 10% will go to my brother as repayment for him kindly lending me the money needed to get it started.

I was very close to sell Adidas when it was up at 155 € and the GBP/EUR was at 1.15. My plan was to sell and bring that money over to the UK. Now it is down at 155 and the GBP is getting closer to 1.20 than to 1.15 so I wait.

Brexit is funny. Directly afterwards people got scared and share prices, house prices and the GBP dropped. Now it seems as if they start to think that things are fine because it was not so bad... life went on as before. Little do they know of what is coming.

I have now managed to set up a stock ISA and the online broker that I decided for is horrible. It must have been a complete idiot that wrote the program! It is simply awful. I have transferred around 2,000 GBP onto the account but I have not managed to be bothered to do more as of yet. I have still not had the time and energy to dig into UK companies and I am leaning more towards just starting up monthly savings in an ETF to get things up and running and hopefully, once I have more time I will be able to start stock picking again. But I am sucking on my thumb on this one...

For the previous summary please visit Summary of July 2016 and here you can see my stock portfolio as it is.

The total invested value is now up at: 85,766 € including a realised loss of -3,757 €. I made no new investments during the month.

The value of the portfolio is today: 80,160 € and I now have around 449 € in cash on the account. The combined unrealised and realised loss is now at: -5,606 € (-7%) which is bad.

DAX jumped up a lot during August which, to me, makes very little sense still it is now at 10,684 points which means +4.5% which clearly beats my own +3.5%.

Conclusion: A good month for me and better still for DAX. The Brexit fear is, to me, surprisingly gone and it makes me believe that a large part of the world has the memory of a gold fish and have no possibility of accessing risks. How large is the risk that one of the 27 EU countries will refuse to accept either the deal with the UK or to refuse to expand the period of allowing the deal to take place and to  be negotiated. The risk is large. I am sorry to say this but Cameron should go into the history books as the most failed politician in modern times.