Contrarian stock bought August 2014: IBM

The decision to pick the monthly contrarian stock was easier this time since I had opened up a new position and I wanted to bring it up to a more acceptable level before moving further. To add to the ease of decision the price had also not deviated much from when I bought it last month.

I therefore increased with an additional 8 shares at a price of 142.31 € per share (including the trading fee) and my average share price for my 16 shares are now at 140.60 € including the trading. To read Contrarian stock bought in July 2014 - IBM please click on this link and to find out more about IBM then go to analysis of IBM 2014.

I am currently sticking to my word and I keep investing around 1,000 € and at the same time I try to save more money into the stock deposit to keep cash available for when the larger correction arrives which maybe is tumbling down on us right now with DAX making a nice drop (-8 to -10%) in the last weeks.

There was also a nice moment to start thinking about buying Adidas (see analysis of Adidas 2014) since they have dropped like a stone by around -20%. I will keep looking at them to see how they develop in the future and I might take a look at their latest quarter report in the end "their" team won the World Championship in football which should contribute to some value and if not then they should stop pushing money into the advertisement.

With the next update of the monthly report the new change will be brought in to the Stock Portfolio.

 

Vacation finished in August 2014

I just got home from the vacation in my summer house and after unpacking, cooking and eating it was time to write a short article. The vacation was by no means extreme and still I found it to be expensive before I sat down and looked over all the bills... so the question is how much should a vacation cost for a family or in this case for two people for three weeks?

How we did it was that we went home to Sweden for three weeks by car and took the ferry from Sassnitz to Trelleborg and we came back the same way in the end.

The ferry cost 155 €.
The petrol to the car including little day trips (~2600 km) cost 183 €.
Parking fees 24 € (expensive to visit Göteborg for a day!)
Food from supermarket 387 €
Books 64 €
Restaurants 170 €
House renovation 115 €

The total cost in cents became 1095.73 € for two people for three weeks. The normal costs for three weeks for the two of us would have been around 300 € so we overspent during the vacation with 800 € for the three weeks. As I sad I thought the vacation had been expensive but looking back at this it was not so bad even though it means one lost block of investment for me.

It was also interesting to see how easily buying things for the summer house runs away in costs especially since 115 € is 12.5% of what I pay for the house during a year (electricity, garbage, water etc.) now that we will cut down the huge trees there I guess we will be forced to bring in more money so I will have to even it out then.

The day before leaving I realised that I had asked the guy to cut down one of the trees that we use to hang the washing line on and that afterwards we will hardly have any trees to make a washing line between. I remembered that a neighbour arrived with a new aluminium rotary washing line a couple of days before so I went and asked what had happened to the old one? Happily it had not been thrown out so I got it for free and will enjoy using it the next time I return to my summer house.

How much extra money are you spending when you go on vacation?
 

Analysis of bpost

Company: bpost

ISIN BE0974268972 | WKN A1W0FA

Business: A postal company from Belgium. They have some sub segments and those are: Transactional Mail (almost half the revenue), Advertising Mail (around 12% of revenue), Press(around 12% of revenue), Parcels, Value-Added Services, International Mail, Banking & Financial Products(around 12% of revenue) and finally "Other".

Active: Very strong presence in Belgium. Have hubs in UK, China, Singapore, Australia and the US.

P/E: 13.1

Summary of July 2014

July has been a month filled of sun, swimming in the ocean and generally enjoying life being on vacation. The costs for this vacation has been lowered by few visits to restaurants and instead we have loved the possibility of making BBQ almost every day and have therefore also made those and loved the taste of it. A friend of mine that came to visit brought some wood for smoking meat and we have tried that with both pork, beef and salmon. In each case it worked very well and the flavour was excellent!

German inside trading: July 2014

High time to go over the German management and their boards to look at the self confidence level! The list below contains what was bought and sold during July 2014: