I must tell you upfront, I’m very proud to present my results after the first quarter of 2015. In fact, I’m REALLY proud since very few bloggers have the guts to post such bold confidence at the beginning of the year and post their updated results throughout the year as well.
It’s easy to “hide” behind a solid stock analysis and without mention of what you expect from the stock price this year.
It’s also very easy to pull out a list of the “top 10 dividend yield growers for the year”.
Just to be clear, I’m not attacking anybody with this statement, I produce both stock analyses and quick stock list ideas through this blog. I’m just saying that I also put my reputation at stake year after year by providing a list of handpicked stocks not only to do well in terms, of dividend payout but a list of stocks that will beat their benchmark at the end of the line. To me, this is the whole point of selecting stocks and managing my own portfolio. If I can’t feel I can beat the market, what would be the point of spending so many hours on this? I could just build a coach potato portfolio with ETFs and rebalance them every 6 months. This is a proven and foolproof method to manage your portfolio. Chances are most investors should follow these rules instead of trading on their own. Still, we love trading, this is why we do it, right?
Beating the Canadian Benchmark by 4.68%!
I must be very honest, I didn’t write this post this morning, therefore, my results are not exactly after one quarter as I wrote this after market close on Monday March 23rd. Still, I was ahead of the XDV (iShares Down Jones Canadian Select Dividend Index Fund) by almost 5%. My list of 10 stocks did +1.35% while XDV was down at -3.33%. Better than this, 7 out of 10 stocks beat the XDV. Therefore, it wasn’t just the luck of picking the right stock that skyrocketed at the beginning of the year (imagine if I had picked Uni-Select (UNS.TO) which posted a solid return of +43.27% since the beginning of the year. These returns are excluding dividend payouts.
The Canadian market was hit big time by the oil industry and financials have followed the downward spiral since many mortgages in Western Canada could become at risk later down the road. It is quite a challenging environment for investors as the “safe value” stocks become very rare.
At the beginning of the year, I highlighted 3 stocks from this special list. Funny enough, two of them show negative results (National Bank (NA.TO) at -4.37% and AG Growth International (AFN.TO) at -5.25%). Intact Financial (IFC) was the third stock disclosed and it is showing the best results so far at +11.77%. This means there are still 6 stocks beating the benchmark for you to discover in this chart:
Beating the US Benchmark by 1.04%
While my results are not that impressive for US stocks, I’m still ahead of my benchmark in terms of returns and I know that I also beat the VIG (Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF) by about 1% in dividend yield. Since we are all dividend investors, this is also a metric that matters, right?
The reason why my results are not that impressive is definitely due to the fact that only 11 stocks out of 20 beat the benchmark. This leaves me with many “questionable” picks for the first quarter. I’ve made some bold picks within this list and some companies didn’t report the results we were all expecting…
At the beginning of the year, I wrote about 4 stocks from this list. Two of them did very poorly (Garmin (GRMN) at -6.50% due to disappointing results and Genuine Parts (GPC) at -10.26%). In my opinion, these two stocks are now definitely on the “buy side”.
On the other hand, I have Apple (AAPL) that did +15.25% since the beginning of the year and BlackRock (BLK) with a decent +4.69%. Here are the rest of my results for the US picks:
Want More? I have 23 other Dividend Stock Picks in my Book!
I’ve compiled a list of 20 US dividend stocks & 10 Canadian dividend stocks to do well in the market for 2015. You just read about four of them and there are still lots to discover in the book! The book includes the 20 dividend stock analyses plus 10 more for Canadian dividend stocks. That’s 40 pages worth of information for only $4.99.
This year, I offer both versions: PDF or Kindle.
Click on the button below for the PDF file:
Click here to buy the Kindle version (Amazon link)
Disclaimer: I hold AAPL and NA.TO in my personal portfolio and all stocks mentioned in this article are part of our DSR portfolios.
DG,
Nice! Looks like you’re cruising past a few benchmarks there, great job. I think I’m probably lagging in a few areas given my purchases in Caterpillar have been at a moot point and IBM/BBL have been up and down for a few weeks, coming to a very similar position.
-Lanny