Summary of December 2021

 

Summary of December 2021

In December I managed to travel to Berlin to have feuerzangenbowle with my old friends there and I also managed to go back home to Sweden to visit and celebrate Christmas and New Years eve with them. I had a great time and even managed to get in some snowboarding in the small ski slope next to my families summerhouse. I hope to go snowboarding again in February with my family in Sweden.

Socks seems to have been the Christmas gift of the year in my family. Exciting? Not very, but oh, so useful!

At work we are still being hit by having customers in Asian countries that do more sever lockdowns due to them not having a sufficiently high percentage of the population vaccinated. Have Covid created a "natural selection" in the western world with such surprisingly high percentage of people refusing to get a vaccination? Life in Germany has become difficult if one is not vaccinated. I could not even enter a normal clothes store without showing my vaccination "passport". If this approach is right or wrong I cannot say but a private company that wants to protect its employees have of course every right to refuse customers - it's as easy as that! This will also be a continued driver of online shopping and having everything delivered  home.

As a final note, I find that the step of travelling is extremely safe with going through security checks, boarding, sitting in the airplane, and finally a passport check upon arrival. I see very low risks with the entire process and I doubt many are being infected during the travel and more so while they are on the vacation location and are being more relaxed and maybe not following procedures all the way.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of November 2021 and here you can see my stock portfolio as it is.

The total invested value is now at: 256,767 €. Monthly investments were made in the Mixed ETF, Rio Tinto and ETF EU.

The value of the portfolio is today: 383,941 € and I have 2,777 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 2,498 € and unrealised of 127,458 € (33%) which is not good enough but it is improving. My ETFs are now up at a value of 61% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 15,948 points which means that it has increased by 4.5% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has increased by 5.6% in the same time period.

Conclusion: Christmas rally took place in spite of the omicron variant. My holdings managed to perform slightly better than DAX during the month and I am being pushed upwards due to an increased value of the Queens shilling. I've very quickly moved towards my new target of (350+50+25=) 425k€ to buy and restore a renovation object in the South of France and are only missing 42k€ (excluding any potential market crashes). I will however not retire earlier and instead I will hopefully further increase the buffer. My brother spoke to me during the Christmas holiday and was worried about my future and especially concerned that the cash would not be enough. He is very sweet though and offered that I could move into his house once his kids have left in 18 years time - so my cash had to hold my floating until then. A very kind offer but I'm 100% certain it will not be required with me working another 1 year and 4 months with remained insane saving percentage.