(This article originally appeared on The DIV-Net) A few days ago one of my colleagues over at the DIV-Net wrote about online brokerages and using Zecco as low cost provider. As a Canadian, I like the sounds of Zecco's low costs however we Canadians are not eligible to open an account with them. In this post I would like to talk about a Canadian broker that I have been using to good effect that offers cheap trades - not $0 trades but pretty close. My primary broker for a long time was the …
Viewing My Sector and Asset Allocation
As part of my portfolio management processes, I have a behemoth spreadsheet that I use that includes all the data on my portfolio, including dividends per year, portfolio values, and investment returns. In addition to these normal portfolio management tools, I have two charts that I use to monitor a couple of very important aspects of my portfolio. These charts give me real time views of my portfolio structure. They include both asset allocation and sector allocation. Let's deal with …
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Sold Some Dividend Cut Stocks
In a recent post, I wrote about how I had altered my investing code to reflect that I would now be selling dividend stocks soon after a dividend cut. This is quite a departure for me as I traditionally had not sold stocks very often. However, given my primary objective to generate a reliable and growing stream of income from dividend stocks, stocks that cut their dividends do not allow me to achieve this goal and something must be done about it. There are really only two things that a …
Calculating My Portfolio’s Annualized Return
I use Microsoft Money to manage my portfolio. I find it very useful to enter and keep track of all the various transactions that occur in a dividend investing portfolio. Through the years I have relied upon the software program to calculate the various returns my portfolio has achieved. However, when I recently upgraded to Microsoft Money Plus Deluxe I saw something strange happen - both my annualized return and year-to-date numbers changed. Upon some further investigation I have found that …
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Three Things Investors Do to Get Into Trouble
I find the recent market action very interesting, especially the headlines in the newspapers and the chatter I hear on elevators, during lunch, or before the start of meetings. The main topic of course is the recent market action and the intense volatility this is having on personal portfolios. There is a lot of stress about it across the board, from young to old and wealth accumulators to close to retirement. The problems are global - I am holding these conversations in Norway and during …
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It’s Not Different This Time
Whenever the stock markets go through a very rough period, it is inevitable that there is talk that this time things are different. I remember the tech bubble in the late-90's when the "new economy" was going to change everything and the stock market was now playing with new and different rules. Valuations were irrelevant, as was company revenue and earnings. As long as the company was in the online space it was going to rule the world. Look what happened then! And here we are again with …
