Summary of November 2017

November was, as always a hard month. Budget, performance discussions, targets for 2018 discussions up and down and on top of that I have had to spend two days per week with my new group which is a 350 km drive back and forth each time and it means that I spend one night per week in a hotel. The team leader is difficult to work with but I have managed to turn him slowly towards the good direction. In 2018 we will accomplish great financial benefits for the business unit.

I spend a couple of days around Barcelona. The last time I was there was back in 2009 for my road trip and then the situation was seriously bad. Today, despite the current Catalan / Spain complication, one can really see how good the Spanish economy is. People have work, people have money and the fears have disappeared. Maybe in some cases that loss of fear even became hubris but that I am not able to judge that.

My work review was fairly good for the year so it will be interesting to see how the company will reward me. My line manager will, according to himself, do his best to push up my salary and bonus. It is working very odd in my company because there are only recommendations going up and still in the end it comes down to the remuneration board to set pretty much all salaries and bonuses. Utterly wrong in my opinion. My team should receive a pot of money based on our performance and then I should distribute that based on how much the team members contributed to those targets. Better still... there should be paid out no bonuses at all.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of October 2017 and here you can see my stock portfolio as it is.

The total invested value is now up at: 91,224 €. I made no new investments during the month of November.

The value of the portfolio is today: 105,568 € and spread out I now have around 6,902 € in cash on the different accounts. I have a realised gain of 1,144 € and the combined realised and unrealised gain is now at: 14,344 € (16%) which is not as good as one would have liked.

DAX did not to very well this month and decreased to 13,154 points which means that the it decreased by -1.7% which should be compared to my more modest decrease of -0.2%.

Conclusion: One of those rare months when my portfolio did better than DAX but that comes mainly from that Deutsche Bank have started to increase in value as of late. I hope it will continue in that direction because it is my largest, in invested value, investment.