Summary of July 2023

 

Summary of July 2023

War is still ongoing and agreements made are no longer kept. The ages of people being called into the army in Russia is increasing, while Ukraine is at it's max capacity. My thoughts and hopes are still with the Ukrainians!

I've significantly underestimated just how slow things are. My consultancy company have not yet been received the all clear and my old company is screaming for me to help them out due to too many projects come to a standstill. Good for me one might think but I really do not want a fulltime job again consulting or otherwise and also it makes me wonder if I left my old company in a bad way i.e. my handover was not as good as I hoped? I provided everything they asked for and more so I should probably conclude that that's on them.

My campingvan conversion is also a lot slower than I had hoped for. Rain, rain, rain is holding me back since I do not want to bring in wet insulation, floors, furniture etc. and my only option for cutting and adjusting things is under the open sky. What I've accomplished to todays date is the following... repaired the car, rust treated and painted the interior, installed a skylight and fan, installed solar panels (no other electrics), installed floor ventilation, insulated the floor and laid floor and now I've started to insulate the walls. Ordering of things have been much slower than I had hoped for and the amount of sunny days in July has been few. I also made a small holiday trip to Andorra to visit a friend, get some sun and allow my brother and his family to have some alone time in the summer cabin. I did not, in the end, perform any jobs with my nephews. A big storm is running in Sweden at the moment and when the sun arrives I need to help my parents to paint their house since that has absolute top priority. My van will have to wait. I shouldn't be stressed about it but I must admit that there is some level of frustration.

During my trip to Andorra, being in and walking in the mountains, I had some time to think and realised that an idea that I had back in 2005 is still viable and I should / must execute on it. This means that I now know what to do with the money that comes into my consultancy company instead of taking it out as salary or as dividends I should invest it into this old, old idea. Anyway... that will have to be after I have sorted out my renovations object where ever I end up buying it. Good time to buy property though!

To sort out some strange holding structures and to sort out my virtual debt to my nephews I sold both Ratos (slightly too early!) and a large part of my H&M holding.

For the previous summary please visit Summary of May/June 2023.

The total invested value is now at: 353,601 €. No investments were made and I sold some H&M and all my Ratos holdings. The strengthening of the pound sterling have also helped out.

The value of the portfolio is today: 498,059 € and I have 1,274 € in cash on my broker accounts. I have realised gains of 7,487 € and unrealised of 144,458 € (29%) which is not good enough. My ETFs are now up at a value of 74% of my portfolio.

DAX is now up at 15,974 points which means that it has decreased by -1.1% since the previous summary and my own portfolio has increased by 1.9% in the same time period.

Conclusion: The stock market went up significantly in July and have started to come back down again and happily my own portfolio performed better than DAX at this point in time.

Dividends in July 2023

 

The months of strong dividend payments are behind us and therefore there will only be some minor trickles arriving for the remainder of the year. Two companies still decided to pay out some cash to me though.

Nike paid out 12.44 € of which the US taxman took 1.87 € and I was left with 33.10 € in cash on my broker account.

ABF also decided to pay out 33.10 € and all of that arrived as cash on my broker account.

Sold stocks during July 2023

 

I had two things that I've been needing to deal with since a long time and that was that I owned part of my H&M shares and all of my Ratos shares in a slightly strange construct which now needed to be sorted out. Secondly I had a debt built up towards all my nephews since the stock brokers that I have been using did not allow me to construct sub accounts for my nephews which can be done very easily in Avanza and was therefore also done. This means that I, moving forward, can very easily buy shares for them for their birthdays and I no longer have to carry a virtual debt to them. I've set it up so that I buy 70% Avanza Global and 30% Avanza Zero to them. I do today consider the low cost ETFs to be superior to any other investments for an amateur investor such as myself.

I therefore sold 353 of my H&M shares at 15.03 € giving 5,305.59 € (loss of -485.83€, -8%) for a holding held for 67 months. Dividend build-up I leave with my remaining shares.

I also sold all my Ratos (in hindsight... a bit early since they have recovered lately) of 1245 shares at 2.51 € giving 3124.95 € (loss of -698.05 €, -18%) and I've received 57.27 € in dividends during a holding period of 65 months.

My current holding period of sold investments are therefore 3.6 years and the change will be updated in the upcoming monthly summary.