Summary of April 2017

My stock buying have still not improved and I am not saving as much as I should be doing at the moment. I need to improve that! The only reason why I ended up buying something during April was due to Deutsche Bank and that was not even initiated by me so I need to shape up on that.

This evening, to my horror, I discovered that I have not been directly accepted to the two summer courses that I have applied for. I do not understand that at all and something is odd because if I do not forget to apply on time then I am in principle 100% certain of getting accepted due to academic points + grades from school. I wonder what has happened and if I should take a battle on the matter or not. My biggest focus right now should be to file the tax declaration for my final half year in Germany. They are clever little buggers.

Each time I have moved from one country to the next I have almost always received money back from the tax office due to that you pay monthly taxes based on the expectation that you will earn that each month for the full year. When you leave in the middle of a year this then always leads to you getting money back.

The clever buggers in Germany demands to see you salaries from the new country. If you then continue to earn similar then they claim that you obviously had the correct tax rate for the year and you get no money back... you might even end up paying them some money if your earnings sky rockets! On the downside for the German tax office you are allowed to deduct moving costs which makes the declaration no fun at all but they have forced me into a corner on this one.

Work is currently stressful but I enjoy my time there very much.

Oh, and I seriously need to finish up the yearly reports and new analysis of all my companies. I am late on that. It should also be mentioned that the pound is disturbing me more and more and I start to consider to shuffle money back to Sweden as a protection for the future...

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

The total invested value is now up at: 89,217 € including a realised loss of -551 €. I did end up buying 140 DB shares.

The value of the portfolio is today: 96,505 € and spread out I now have around  € in cash on the different accounts. The combined unrealised and realised loss is now at: 7,288 € (8%) which is not as good as one would have liked.

DAX did very well during April and is now up at 12,508 points which means an increase of +1.8%! My stock portfolio did however perform slightly better during April and went up with 2.5%.

Conclusion: I had a good month but much of this was due to DB and temporary currency effects. I still have a, for me, fairly high %-age of cash that probably should be invested into ETFs.

Dividend from IBM, BP, Nike & ETF Austria: April 2017

I received a nice dividend from my 25 shares in IBM and it was in the size of 32.90 €. From this I ended up paying taxes in the size of 4.94 € and 27.96 € was added as cash to my broker account.

To find out more about IBM then please visit analysis of IBM 2017.

My cash cow BP paid out a nice dividend as usual and for my 1,220 shares I received a total of 115.75 € that was paid out directly as cash on my broker account.

To find out more about BP then please visit analysis of BP 2017.

For my 40 shares in Nike I received a tiny dividend of 6.74 € from this was removed 1.01 € in taxes and I received 5.73 € as cash on my broker account.

To find out more about Nike then please visit analysis of Nike 2017.

For my 80 shares in my ETF Austria I received a total of 75.76 € which was directly reinvested and I must say that I am pleased with this increase since last year I only received around 49 €.

To find out more about ETF Austria then please click here.

To see my total dividend flow then please visit the Stock Dividends page that will soon be updated. 

Stock bought April 2017: DB

This investment was forced upon me so I really did not have a choice on the matter. DB is now one of my longest running investments and still today there are things appearing concerning new illegal things that were done mainly while the two crooks were still sitting in power. As shareholders this have been a long, long period filled of disappointments which, should never be forgotten, to a large extent comes from the shareholders on the board and their decision to bring up the two crooks in the power position.

I bought an additional 140 shares at a value of 11.65 € per share on top of this I had to pay a brokers fee which means that I have now invested in total (including fees) 9,484 € into DB and I hold 420 shares.

I never expected this investment to stay with me for so long.

To find out more concerning Db then please visit DB analysis 2016.

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

Summary of March 2017

We just came home from a weekend in Wales. Their language sounds similar to Icelandic to me and it is amazing how far away it is from English. The countryside was beautiful and every now and then there were signs about EU projects that had been there to develop the region. Wales voted for Brexit so I guess they did not appreciate the efforts that EU did but somehow the UK have neglected to do to try to improve things. That is life. It makes me thing of a story Munger was telling about a friend of his and a tenant that friend had had. This tenant refused to pay any rent to Mungers friend due to: "I received a scholarship for studying at the University that was in his name so he already have enough money!" The gratitude of some people is great.

My wife is very happy with her job so that is indeed good news! It is a big company and the development possibilities are tremendous and more importantly the company care about developing their employees.

Lately at my work all I seem to do is meetings. EMT wants this EMT wants that. In the next two weeks I will make a larger presentation for the gathered EMT members about what my team has accomplished and where we will go. I still stick around for the shareholders meeting that will be the day after. I was very clearly instructed that I am not allowed to ask any nasty questions. I was actually planning to take vacation to be able to attend the shareholders meeting so now I do not have to do that and I get the travels paid for. Double Win!

Another two weeks passing from that and I need to step in front of the board and explain myself to them. The chairman of the board is apparently a tough cookie so that will be exciting. I am not very concerned though... In the last EMT meeting the CEO informed me that when they discussed the possibilities one year ago of what could potentially be accomplished then they would never have expected my team to even be close to what we have now accomplished in just nine months. I have good guys in my team!

I still find it difficult to buy shares at the moment and I have additionally been saving more to my wife's tax free account than to my own broker account so very little developments there. This will most likely change soon and then next couple of months I hope to be able to push more money into my broker account which will then hopefully also lead to me buying shares. I did however join in on the DB offer so some money will go to that now during April. When I calculate what we have managed to save during the last nine months (of which eight my wife has not had a job) then we are up at almost 32k EUR. I am astonished by the quantity when I see it like that and I only wish all of it would be in stocks but instead plenty goes to holiday saving, house saving etc.

It is now five years since I started to invest in stocks according to the contrarian investment approach. Stupidity have led me thrice to large losses (Asian Bamboo, Eniro & Gerry Weber) and I still have several initial investments that have during this five year period not yet managed to recover and even worse the daggers kept falling after I bought them (DB, Coba and E.On.). This means that according to my initial rule I should now convert my stock portfolio 50% into index funds. Since I already have 11% in index fund I should convert an additional 39% into it. I am not so happy doing this at the moment but I will commit to increasing my %-age into index funds simply buy starting to buy index funds for some of the cash that I have at hand during the next convenient moment. By doing so I also avoid the UK stamp duty that I find pretty annoying.

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

The total invested value is now up at: 87,577 € including a realised loss of -551 €. No, new shares were bought.

The value of the portfolio is today: 92,572 € and spread out I now have around 8,475 € in cash on the different accounts. The combined unrealised and realised loss is now at: 4,996 € (6%) which is not as good as one would have liked.

DAX is doing very well and did so also during March and is now up at 12,282 points which means an increase of +1.8%! Woow! I am of course not as skilled as the CEOs of the 30 DAX companies and I therefore only have +0.7% for my portfolio.

Conclusion: DAX keeps beating me. I really should convert all of my stocks to index funds. The only whisper in the back of my head is from Lynch claiming that his best investments were seven years long. Still, I find many stocks expensive so index funds are not a bad option.

Fast Retailing annual report 2016

For the report in full please go here, to find out more concerning Fast Retailing then please visit analysis of Fast Retailing.

In the financial statement below we see that 2016 was not a great year for Fast Retailing. They had a very, very moderate revenue increase which is very bad and what makes it even worse is that the earnings are far from where they should be. The last time they were down at this level in earnings was in 2009. The sale area did also not improve with an impressive value and year to year sales, especially in Japan, is not something to brag about.

Conclusion: Fast Retailing is currently having a tough time and Japan, their oh so important home market, are not delivering as one would have hoped. That should today be a cash cow that should support the expansion everywhere else in the world but instead stores needs to be closed down. I am not very happy with the development in Fast Retailing but I will remain as a shareholder for the time being because I do believe that they will have a bright future with their cloths and their store concept.