We just came home from a weekend in Wales. Their language sounds similar to Icelandic to me and it is amazing how far away it is from English. The countryside was beautiful and every now and then there were signs about EU projects that had been there to develop the region. Wales voted for Brexit so I guess they did not appreciate the efforts that EU did but somehow the UK have neglected to do to try to improve things. That is life. It makes me thing of a story Munger was telling about a friend of his and a tenant that friend had had. This tenant refused to pay any rent to Mungers friend due to: "I received a scholarship for studying at the University that was in his name so he already have enough money!" The gratitude of some people is great.
My wife is very happy with her job so that is indeed good news! It is a big company and the development possibilities are tremendous and more importantly the company care about developing their employees.
Lately at my work all I seem to do is meetings. EMT wants this EMT wants that. In the next two weeks I will make a larger presentation for the gathered EMT members about what my team has accomplished and where we will go. I still stick around for the shareholders meeting that will be the day after. I was very clearly instructed that I am not allowed to ask any nasty questions. I was actually planning to take vacation to be able to attend the shareholders meeting so now I do not have to do that and I get the travels paid for. Double Win!
Another two weeks passing from that and I need to step in front of the board and explain myself to them. The chairman of the board is apparently a tough cookie so that will be exciting. I am not very concerned though... In the last EMT meeting the CEO informed me that when they discussed the possibilities one year ago of what could potentially be accomplished then they would never have expected my team to even be close to what we have now accomplished in just nine months. I have good guys in my team!
I still find it difficult to buy shares at the moment and I have additionally been saving more to my wife's tax free account than to my own broker account so very little developments there. This will most likely change soon and then next couple of months I hope to be able to push more money into my broker account which will then hopefully also lead to me buying shares. I did however join in on the DB offer so some money will go to that now during April. When I calculate what we have managed to save during the last nine months (of which eight my wife has not had a job) then we are up at almost 32k EUR. I am astonished by the quantity when I see it like that and I only wish all of it would be in stocks but instead plenty goes to holiday saving, house saving etc.
It is now five years since I started to invest in stocks according to the contrarian investment approach. Stupidity have led me thrice to large losses (Asian Bamboo, Eniro & Gerry Weber) and I still have several initial investments that have during this five year period not yet managed to recover and even worse the daggers kept falling after I bought them (DB, Coba and E.On.). This means that according to my initial rule I should now convert my stock portfolio 50% into index funds. Since I already have 11% in index fund I should convert an additional 39% into it. I am not so happy doing this at the moment but I will commit to increasing my %-age into index funds simply buy starting to buy index funds for some of the cash that I have at hand during the next convenient moment. By doing so I also avoid the UK stamp duty that I find pretty annoying.
For the previous summary please visit Summary of February 2017 and here you can see my stock portfolio as it is.
The total invested value is now up at: 87,577 € including a realised loss of -551 €. No, new shares were bought.
The value of the portfolio is today: 92,572 € and spread out I now have around 8,475 € in cash on the different accounts. The combined unrealised and realised loss is now at: 4,996 € (6%) which is not as good as one would have liked.
DAX is doing very well and did so also during March and is now up at 12,282 points which means an increase of +1.8%! Woow! I am of course not as skilled as the CEOs of the 30 DAX companies and I therefore only have +0.7% for my portfolio.
Conclusion: DAX keeps beating me. I really should convert all of my stocks to index funds. The only whisper in the back of my head is from Lynch claiming that his best investments were seven years long. Still, I find many stocks expensive so index funds are not a bad option.
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