In the previous article, I talked about my performance for Forex portfolio in the first quarter of 2017. This article will lay out the equity investments portfolio performance for the 1st quarter. Unlike for forex, I don’t have much performance results for equity investment portfolio….at least for now.
Cash is trash.
For the first quarter of 2017, my stock investment portfolio was down 1.31%.
In the 1st quarter, I bought W.P. Carey (WPC). In this Seeking Alpha article, I laid out why I bought the diversified REIT.
Also during the quarter, I bought short-term bond ETFs. Such ETFs are Vanguard Short-Term Bond ETF (BSV), iShares 1-3 Year Credit Bond ETF (CSJ), Vanguard Short-Term Government Bond ETF (VGSH), and PowerShares Emerging Markets Sovereign Debt ETF (PCY).
I bought those ETFs for four reasons;
First, I had a lot of cash sitting in my portfolio. Cash did not add any value to my portfolio.
Second, the ETFs barely moves and yet offers attractive dividends that would be distributed every month, with low expense ratio. Instead of having cash be lazy, the ETFs provided free money since they barely moved in price.
And lastly, the ETFs were commission-free through my broker, Ameritrade. When opportunities arise, I can freely liquidate the ETFs position(s).
All three reasons provided me with great flexibility and free money. The average SEC 30 Day yield from the “big four” is currently 2.43%.
And lastly, I also bought iShares Core Conservative Allocation ETF (AOK). I bought this ETF for the same reasons I bought the “big four” ETFs; low risk, low fees, and attractive dividends.
The portfolio of the five ETFs mentioned above returned 2.77% in the past 5 years, with the largest quarterly loss at 2.65% in the 4th quarter of last year and the largest quarterly gain at 1.70% in the 1st quarter of last year. Year-to-date, it’s up 1.32%.
Estimated investment portfolio dividend yield is 2.8%, with largest being 6.4% and lowest 0%. I plan to increase the portfolio dividend yield by getting rid of non-dividend yielding stocks and/or buying dividend-yielding stocks.
I did not sell anything in the portfolio during the first quarter. However, I’m planning to make some changes this quarter, which will be released in the 2nd quarter performance article. But first, I will probably tweet out the changes.
32.30% of my portfolio is currently in cash. I plan to cut that in half. How will I do it? I’m not sure yet. I’m doing research on multiple companies. The one that stands out will be bought and an article about it will be posted, mostly likely on Seeking Alpha.
Note: Equity/Commodity active trading portfolio (Robinhood) performance will be posted later.
Update: “Q1 2017 Performance: Equity/Commodity Trading” article is posted.
