Stocks bought/sold June 2022

 

I increased my holding in RioTinto by buying 40 more shares at a total cost of 2,376 €. My total holding is now 150 shares at a cost of 9,590 €.

I also sold off Stock X so 364 shares departed and this gave me 71 € in cash on my broker account after the trading fees were paid giving a total loss of 991 €. Stock X was a small American company that was seeking FDA approval for a drug that is already commonly used in the world, including EU. However they failed miserably in getting that approval hence no reason to keep them.

Stocks sold July 2018: ABF, Hugo Boss, Fast Retailing, CEZ, Fugro, ETF Austria, ETF Portugal

Due to the upcoming divorce I have decided to clean up my portfolio and to liberate cash. On top of this I will most likely not make any further investments for the coming half year to build up additional cash to pay for legal costs as well as to be able to transfer money to my soon to be ex-wife. The process cannot be started up until in November-January 2019 and the process will most likely take six months. So besides from building up the necessary cash to make sure that nothing further will be required it is better for me to spend money and to live a life of extravagance. It will be very difficult to convert my mindset but then again I should start dating again and that is never cheap.

I have also started to think seriously about marriage. In the past there were tax benefits, there was a protection for the housewife and the children but today in most countries these "benefits" neither exists nor are they needed. Both husband and wife are educated and earn their own living, children are protected by the society in general as well as other regulations so why should one then get married?

I will never marry again. If my, hopefully, future partner want to receive some form of security then that will be dealt with by writing a last will and testament. Both will of course write these and they can be signed in the presence of witnesses and afterwards one can have a "wedding-like" party. If the relationship will not work out then these documents can be ripped apart and in the meantime you and your partner can have a similar protection as if you were married. This is my idea to circumvent the old fashioned regulatory system that exists in most countries in the world today. Am I wrong?

Sold due to upcoming divorce as well as had being bought in a very annoying broker account that I tried out and was not very happy with.

I sold 77 shares (I still own 100 shares) that I bought for 2144.30 € and after fees I ended up with 2148.20 € on my broker account that was swiftly closed down after this sale.

This investment was made back in October 2016 which means that my holding period was 23 months and I made a 0.2% profit on this and no dividends has been accounted here.

To follow the journey of ABF please click here.

Sold due to divorce but also since they had pretty much reached the 30% profit target that I wanted them to reach on top of things.

I sold all my 35 shares that I had bought for 2136.00 € and after fees I ended up with 2701.29 € on my broker account.

The initial investment was made in January 2017 which means that my holding period was only 19 months and in this period I made a profit of 26.5% as well as receiving almost 185 € in dividends.

To follow the journey of Hugo Boss then please click here.

Sold mainly due to divorce. I also felt that I had too much in retail and could do with decreasing that quantity slightly.

I sold my 6 shares that I had bought for 2140.00 € and after fees I ended up with 2180.95 € on my broker account.

The initial investment was made in October 2015 which means that my holding period was 34 months and in this period I made a profit of 1.9% and had only received dividends in the size of 43.07 €.

To follow the journey of Fast Retailing then please click here.

Sold due to divorce. I had previously stated that I was not happy with the behaviour of the managers in CEZ especially all the dealings that took place around buying out the coal power plants and coal mines in Germany from Vattenfall. I then said that as soon as the share price had recovered slightly then I would directly sell them off. Many of the power supplying companies have recovered so it was time to get rid of it.

I sold my 100 shares that I had bought for 2142.00 € and after fees I received 2229.10 € as cash on my broker account.

The initial investment was made in April 2014 which means that I had a 52 months holding period of this company. During this period I made a profit of 4.1% and I was additionally paid out 559 € in dividends which is not so bad.

To follow the journey of CEZ then please click here.

Sold due to divorce. Probably the wrong moment to sell this company but I am not impressed with how few orders they managed to bring in considering that the oil price have been higher now for well over a year. So it felt good to clean it out of the portfolio.

I sold my 120 shares that I had bought for 2166.00 € and after fees I received 1392.70 € out as cash on my broker account.

The investment was made back in September 2014 which gives me a holding period of 47 months and during this period I have made a loss of 36% and I have received no dividends.

To follow the journey of Fugro then please click here.

Sold due to divorce. The Austrian index (ETF Austria held by DB) had increased by around 40% and have remained there for a while. It was time to leave this investment.

I sold my 80 parts that I had bought for 3083.00 € and after fees I received 4356.12 € put as cash on my broker account.

The investment was made in March 2015 and I therefore have a holding period of 41 months. During this period I have made a profit of 43.1% and on top of that I have received 215 € in dividends.

To follow the journey of ETF Austria then please click here.

Sold due to divorce. The Portugal index (ETF Portugal held by Commerzbank) have not increased enough but I needed a bit more money and for this reason I decreased my holding slightly.

I sold 380 parts that I had bought for 2264.80 € and after fees I received 2485.04 € out as cash on my broker account.

The investment was initially made back in March 2016 and I therefore have a holding period of 29 months. During this period I have had a profit of 9.7% and I have received no dividends.

To follow the journey of ETF Portugal then please click here.

My average holding period for sold shares are now at: 35 months, almost 3 years.

Any changes will be brought into the stock portfolio upon the next update in the very end of the month.

Stock sold December 2017: Deere

My sales criteria for Deere was when Warren Buffet sold his shares. Today I would never put such a criteria in place and to be fair I correctly also ignored in when it comes to Deere as I am currently ignoring it when it comes to IBM. For me the Deere shares have reached over valuation and the value has gone from around 80 up to around 150 USD in less than a year without the earnings to follow up on that. If Deere would today have had "normal" earnings then they would be fairly valued but they are not yet there and I am not certain when they will be there but by the look of things the market has already priced them as if they would be there.

I have therefore left Deere as a shareholder and I sold all my 30 shares for, around 127.3 € per share, giving a total of 3,819.81 € and I had to pay -9.55 € in fees which means that I was left with 3809.81 € in cash on my broker account.

I bought it back in October 2015 and I sold it now in December 2017 which gives an unfortunately short holding time of only 26 months (my average of sold shares are at 36 months). During this period I made a profit of 82% and on top of that I have received 128.21 € in dividends.

To follow the journey of Deere then please click here.

Any changes will be brought into the stock portfolio upon the next update in the very end of the month.

Stocks sold September 2017: Enel and Uniper

Uniper was a gift that was handed out to me from E.On. The initial idea from E.On was to make one purely green utility company (under the name of E.On) and one less green company under the name of Uniper. Great idea but poor execution that was stopped my various German governmental bodies which means that E.On still had to hold on to nuclear power stations.

Since the Fortum sold off their power grid in for instance Sweden (idiots in my opinion) they have been searching for new places to put this money and the market have apparently suspected one of those locations to be Uniper. Fortum and E.On have recently announced the take over. Due to my take over experience with K+S that I utterly failed to respond correctly to I decided to pretty much always step out of a company if there is an offer and the share price on the market is pretty much close to that offer. Hence, I stepped out of Uniper.

I therefore sold all my 40 shares in Uniper and I received a total of 875.10 € paid out on my broker account which means, since they were handed out to me from E.On at 10 € per share, that I made a profit of 475.10 € which is the equivalent of 119% profit and additionally I have received 22 € in dividends. Since this was a gift from E.On I consider my holding time to have been 67 months.

To find out more about Uniper please click here.

Enel is by far my best utility company investment. Very early on I was annoyed that I had managed to buy more before the share price started to increase and all I had was an initial investment of 1077 € for the 450 shares that I bought back in 2013 for 2.38 € per share.

The wonderful thing with Enel is that they are the most green utility company that I have had which would be excellent also moving forward in the future but there is a price boarder on everything and Enel have lately gone past that. When a utility company is trading up at a P/E above 20 WITH excellent earnings then for me it is a very clear signal to walk away and that is exactly what I did.

When I sold my shares the price was up at 5.125 € and I received 1220.38 € out in cash as profit. This means that I made a profit of 113% during my 51 months of holding and on top of that I have received 274.5 € in dividends.

To find out more about Enel and to follow the journey then please click here.

My average holding time on my sold investments are now up at 36 months which I find fully acceptable.

Any changes will be brought into the stock portfolio upon the next update in the very end of the month.

Stocks sold February 2017: Eniro, Gerry Weber and Kernel

I wanted to keep Eniro until the very bitter end. Not because I believe they can turn anything around but simply as a monthly reminder of how poor the decision was to invest in them. To buy into a company where the CEO has been arrested for not running things with the company properly is not a good idea. To take a current event example then that would be to buy into Samsung now. Every company everywhere will have a couple of crooks employed. Once the authorities start to seriously look into a company or person for that matter then you will always be able to find something. It does not please me to say so but I honestly believe that to be true.

Eniro had a crook CEO. The CEO that took after was, by the look of things, not better. The person running the show now I neither know or care what or who he is. Key employees will have left the company and what is left is a call center in Poland.

With Eniro I additionally learnt to take a look at the goodwill. If your goodwill is higher than your equity and your tangible assets are non existing all the while having a large debt... well... that will not end very well and it did not.

Due to tax reasons I decided to walk a separate road compared to Eniro and I sold all my 850 shares, that I had paid 1035 € to acquire, for 13.60 €. There were some fees but I think I got some slack because they only reached the value of 13.60 € which means that I received zero € out for that sale. Due to that I once sold share rights for 74.50 € this "investment" did not become a -100% loss but merely a -93% loss. Eniro became, in the end, a 31 months holding.

The reason for why Gerry Weber ended up in my visual field at all was due to insider trading. The new CEO, the son of one of the founders, was each month buying shares after shares after shares. He did that when the share price was up at over 30 € so when it dropped down to around 20 € I started to look upon it as being an interesting investment. The new CEO kept buying shares. Not that long afterwards the price dropped further down to around 15 € before it started to settle around 10 to 12 €. All of a sudden the CEO was not buying any more shares.

In the article that I wrote when I bought the shares I was already then annoyed with myself because I never ever saw any customers in the store. Never. It was therefore a kind of anti-Lynch company where the books looked ok however a company without any customers will only end up at one location in the end. The bin!

I have too many companies and far too many within retail that removing one while having a tax benefit from doing so felt pretty ok. Gerry Weber you are out! and for the future of the company I hope that Ralf Weber will pretty soon also be out!

I sold my 50 shares including the removal of fees for 509 € which gives me a loss of 530 €. I received a tiny dividend in the size of 20 € which gives me a loss of -49%. Gerry Weber stayed with me for 28 months more than what they should have stayed.

Kernel was a pure low P/E, P/B and looking into a war zone where very often share prices of companies drops like stones even though they are still able to continue their business. Sometimes they are even able to perform better during such situations so it was a classical contrarian company. When I look back at the reason for why I bought it then there was not that many. I had tried to buy another one but ended up with this one... was more or less the reason for the buy. In war zones everything drops so maybe no other reason is actually needed.

I ended up buying more shares in Kernel on four different occasions which came from that the share price kept dropping and back then I had my "auto" rule of buying more shares when the drop went passed certain borders.

After a couple of years the share price started to increase and I was sitting around with a Ukrainian agricultural company, in a war zone, having plenty of business with Russia in the size of 10% of my entire stock portfolio. I then decided to decrease the holding and I sold off a large part of my shares at a profit of 35%. I now decided to sell off the rest of this holding because there were several things in the latest report that I have not been so happy with.

They are playing around a lot with the valuation of the crops on the fields and not only in storage. The have hired a person for hedging. The dollar is very strong and all crops are traded in dollars so their profits are inflated due to this... all the while they are unable to increase their revenue flow since many, many years now. An insider, it must have been the founder and CEO, sold off larger portions of shares during the end January. For me that was enough and I decided it was time to leave.

I sold my remaining 170 shares for 2864 € with a 92% gain. Looking at the entire Kernel investment then I made a profit of 2518 € and I received almost 160 € in dividends giving me a profit of 56% during the 45 months that I remained as a shareholder in Kernel.

My average holding time of my departed shares are now up at 29 months.

Any changes will be brought into the stock portfolio upon the next update in the very end of the month.

Stock sold January 2017: Adidas

As I previously mentioned I should have sold my Adidas position last summer when they were up around 158 € per share during a day or two but I did not manage to get my thumb out quickly enough and the share price dropped down again. This time I had already come to terms with that Adidas is fully valued. Yes, they will have a bright future but the share price increase will from now on be ticking up with their earnings and not due to a realisation from Mr. Market that the future of this company is maybe not to go bankrupt which they seemed to think in January 2015 when I bought my shares. I was then also looking at other companies such as Nike that were trading well above a P/E of 30 which I therefore considered to be the valuation that Adidas hopefully also one day should have. They did and they do which meant that I sold them.

This holding was unfortunately very short with only 24 months and it pushed down my sold shares portfolio time to 25.6 months.

I sold my 35 shares for a total value of 5379 € (fees removed). I additionally gained 108.5 € in dividends during these 24 months and on my invested 1978 € I therefore made 177% and it has been my best investment as of yet.

Stock sold October 2015: Kernel

I no longer remember where and when I wrote about Kernel and my thoughts but it does not matter. Kernel grew to the size it was in my portfolio (around 10%) due to that I kept averaging down on my share price and now the price have started to go up. If I had not done that then I would not have had the size of the holding that I now have and I would also not have been able to sell it with a small gain but now I could do this. Averaging down worked well in this case and poorly in for instance the case of Asian Bamboo. Kernel, due to the war, could have become another Asian Bamboo (or Eniro for that matter) and I have had enough of those bad investments.

Kernel is by the look of it a good company I was just no longer prepared to have 10% of my stock portfolio in it and I therefore decided to sell off around 70% to invest in other companies.

Stock sold September 2015: MüRe

I am very unhappy about what I did this evening but my rule was that when Berkshire Hathaway leaves MüRe then I should also leave. Today I received an ad hoc notification that Berkshire are decreasing their quantity of shares. Part of the reason that I decide to leave is because they are sitting on 10% of the shares and heaven knows how many Warren Buffett followers additionally meaning that I have no clue how far the share price might drop. With my small volume... 25 shares... I have the advantage to be able to act quickly so I did. I will directly also state that if the share price drops down to 130 € and below then I will buy back MüRe because I still like it as a piggy-bank with its high dividend payments.

I like MüRe a lot and I have been very happy with this investment. It was even my very first investment back in March 2012 so the holding time is up at 42 months which is too short for my taste but I hope that I will improve on that aspect in the future.

Stock sold March 2015: Asian Bamboo

I finally decided to put on the trousers as they would say in Germany and I sold my entire Asian Bamboo investment. I have many times written that I should have sold it a long time ago and for tax reasons it did not make any sense to sell them but today enough was enough.

Back in December 2014 two of their creditors demanded their money back and since apparently nothing has happened they today demanded Asian Bamboo insolvent. Nothing good will come out of that and the latest preliminary results for Asian Bamboo for 2014 and outlook for 2015 were appalling and they were expecting even lower revenue and are completely stopping to sell products and keep preparing for them becoming a construction company... So the bunk story continues.

Asian bamboo joined my stock portfolio as my fourth investment and it was bought on the second month (5th of April 2012, holding time 34 months) that I took the decision to become an investor. I no longer remember if they had published their annual report for 2011 or not but my investment was based on the annual report from 2010 and the years before showing a very successful company.