Category:

Investing

How to grow your money and enjoy healthy returns

ANNUAL DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE 2024

by Yoda January 5, 2025

I cannot believe it! 2024 was crazy! Market notched 57 record closes on its way to end, with S&P500 up 23.31% and Nasdaq 28%. 2 back to back years of 20+% returns. Who would have thought? Here is my dividend income update for the year 2024 & what I did with my portfolio.

Dividend Income Update 2024

I made 8535.41 USD from my positions in 2024! It came from the following stocks and ETF’s:

dividend income update from all stocks in portfolio in 2024 — Dividend Income Update 2024

This represents 44% increase as compared to last years dividend income updat e. Here is percentage breakdown of income from different stocks in the portfolio:

dividend income update pie chart for 2024 — 2024 Dividend Income Update Pie

I am glad over 33% of dividends this year came from ETF’s (fixed income or equity). I will try and make this an even bigger pie in next year’s dividend income update !

My Buys in 2024

Too many buys to list out. But in addition to adding to my existing stocks like VTI, BND, VXUS, PFE, SBUX, PEP, ARE, TROW, O, here are the new positions I initiated in 2024:

Utilities were down a lot in the beginning of the year which gave me an opportunity to start a position in WEC Energy Group (WEC). They provide electricity and natural gas to multiple states in Midwest. It rarely goes at a 4% yield and I decided to pull the trigger then.

Humana (HUM) is in the business of providing health insurance to seniors mostly in Medicare Advantage section of the industry. It was a bad year for insurers due to multiple issues resulting in 40-45% drop in HUM’s stock price. I initiated a position in them and loaded up throughout the year.

First Industrial (FR) is a REIT that focuses on warehouses and logistics centers. REIT’s have been hammered down over rising rates and I decided to start my position in this.

Zoetis (ZTS) is a spinoff from Pfizer which focuses on animal healthcare. Animal health is a fast growing industry and ZTS is a leader in the industry. Decided to initiate a position when ZTS dropped in 140’s at beginning of 2024.

IBDS/IBDU iShares iBonds 2027/2029 Investment grade ETF’s. I came across these and these seem like a great idea. They are fixed maturity bond etf, that allow you to hold multiple investment grade bonds all of which expire by December of their maturity year. Unlike BND in which the yield and payout keeps changing as the underlying bonds mature and new bonds get added at prevailing yields. I though this product from Blackrock gave a more fixed yield which I know will end at its maturity. At the same time, I can hold multiple bonds in this ETF. Each share is 25$ face value and at maturity you are supposed to get it back (minus any per share impact of any company bonds in etf that defaulted of course) You can read more about it here and here.

My Sells and dividend cuts in 2024

Intel suspended its dividend this year which will impact my dividend income going forward. I need to re-evaluate if I want to keep the position in my portfolio or not, but their trouble seem to be never ending.

I sold out my positions in Phillip Morris(PM), Phillips 66 (PSX), Ally Financial Inc (ALLY) at or close to their highs in 2024. These were all very small positions and I did not see buying more of them to increase my dividend income, so decided to sell them to re-invest elsewhere.

Performance for the year 2024

My overall portfolio ended up at 14.32% for the year which is a big difference as compared to the market returns of 23% from VTI itself. Major laggard in my portfolio was about 20+% of fixed income (bonds, t-bills) that I now hold. Some of it might just be my emergency fund, some I might use in a downturn. Few more stocks contributing to underperformance were INTC, VFC both down about 50% from my cost basis.

Here is a neat timeline of dividends thrown by my DGI portfolio over the last few years which shows compounding of dividend income in action.

Plans for 2025

With my current holdings, I am already looking at 9700$ in 2025 in dividend income. So the stretch goal would be to get to about 11K in dividend income in 2025. I want more of it coming from ETF’s again. Hopefully close to 45% from ETF’s would make it more safe.

Dividends stocks do come with some risk, but with precautions you can avoid the risky one’s and choose the best dividend paying/growing stocks for your portfolio. I prepared a guide where I discuss some key ratios, fundamentals, some important resources to look at while deciding to buy a dividend stock. Also find out how to get free access to Morningstar, Value Line, workaround paywall behind popular news sites like Seeking Alpha etc. Consider signing up for free instant access to the pdf version of the insights into dividend investing.

January 5, 2025 0 comments

Dividend Investing

ANNUAL DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE 2023

by Yoda March 7, 2024

2023 was wild! started with bank failures and who would have guessed ended with S&P500 up 25% and Nasdaq 42%. Sandwiched in between were countless calls for a recession which never arrived, thanks to the power of American consumerism. Here is my dividend income update for the year 2023 & what I did with my portfolio.

Dividend Income Update 2023

I made 5945 USD from my positions in 2023! It came from the following stocks and ETF’s:

This represents 18% increase as compared to last years dividend income update. Here is percentage breakdown of income from different stocks in the portfolio.

dividend income update 2023 percentage — 2023 dividend by percentages

My goal for the last 2-3 years has been to decrease the percentage of dividends from individual stocks like NATI, MO in each dividend income update. NATI went from 26% to 16% in 2023! NATI also got bought out by Emerson in 2023. This will eliminate my NATI dividends in 2024. That sucks in the long run since those dividends were compounding for me. However I did make a 100% return on my investment.

My Buys in 2023

Despite the 18% increase in VTI in 2023, there was lot of volatility in the market due to interest rates. Fed kept raising rates till middle of the year and paused since then. This lead to great buying opportunities in REIT’s, stable dividend stocks.

I initiated a new position in Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc (ARE). They got beaten down due to interest rates and the office real estate industry they operate in. However they are not any typical office space. They are into offices for biotech companies which have very special requirements.

Started a new position in Charles Schwab Corporation Common Stock (SCHW) after they got beaten down due to the banking crisis in the first half of the year.

Initiated positions in Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund ETF (BND) and Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund ETF (VXUS). I want to have more dividend income coming from ETF’s in future. Buying BND is also a bet on interest rates coming down and it can give me some capital appreciation as well.

Healthcare also had a down year in 2023. I took this opportunity to start positions in Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) & Medtronic PLC (MDT). Both have excellent credit ratings and a very safe dividend. I believe these two can whether any storm and are excellent additions quality wise in my portfolio.

Apart from the new adds I increase my positions in O, VZ, VTI, ORCL throughout the year.

My Sells and dividend cuts in 2023

As mentioned before NATI got acquired which let me to let go off my stake.

I also sold LW, ONL as they were too small a position in my portfolio and contributed for very less dividend.

I faced dividend cuts in VFC and INTC both of which I still hold. INTC went down 50% and has come back in the past year. I still like the brands VFC owns and want to see them succeed in the long term.

Performance for the year 2023

I ended the year at 28.6% as compared to 25.5% for SPY and 42% for Nasdaq. Another year of beating SPY/VTI in the books. Here is a neat timeline of dividends thrown by my DGI portfolio over the last few years which shows compounding of dividend income in action.

Plans for 2024

I will continue to buy more etf’s and want to see them becoming a much bigger part of the next annual dividend income update. Reduce dependance and risk from dividends from individual stocks. Add/increase position sizes in highest quality dividend payers.

March 7, 2024 0 comments

Dividend Investing

ANNUAL DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE 2022

by Yoda March 5, 2024

Dividend investing for me is a long-term strategy. I like to buy great companies at good value based on historical metrics, dividend safety & future prospects. Hold them for a long time, re-invest dividends and wait for compounding to do its magic. 2022 was a crazy year! S&P500 finished 2022, 19.4 % down. Energy was the one of the top performing sector. Where as the pandemic infused growth of many technology stocks seemed to be fizzing out. I bonds made a gigantic comeback providing up to 7% risk-free annual yields in 2022. Here is my dividend income update for the year 2022 & what I did with my portfolio.

Dividend Income Update 2022

I made 4817 USD from my positions in 2022! It came from the following stocks:

$ 4817 represents another 25% increase in dividend income from 2021. Here is a percentage breakdown of dividends from all stocks in my portfolio.

One of my goals for 2022 was to reduce the reliance on dividends from NATI, T & MO. I was able to bring their contributions down from 45 to 41%. At the same time I was also able to increase my dividends from VTI by almost double the amount in 2021. This helps in lowering the risk on my dividend income.

If you are interested in these graphs and charts, please check out my post on how to create your own google sheet to track your portfolio across multiple accounts and create such graphs and chart.

My Buys in 2022

I bought a lot of stocks in 2022.

I doubled my VTI holdings over the year which should provide me about 580$ in 2023 dividend income update.

EDV (Vanguard Extended Duration ETF): This is a risky pick. Its an etf holding 24 year out US government bonds and treasury bills. At todays prices it provides about a 4% yield. However its price solely trades inversely to interest rates declared by the fed. If the fed rates go up, the price of this etf goes down in order to provide the same interest rate. Look at how its price has come down from 140 to 82 in 2022 on the back of interest rates going to all time highs in last few years. However the inverse is also true, with the FED signaling interest rates to pause and maybe even start dropping in middle of 2023, the price of this etf could start going back up. I will exit this position if it goes 20% down from here, but hold it if it starts going up in 2023.

INTC (Intel Corp): I had started buying this in 2021 and bought way more in 2022 after the carnage in stock price this year. I still think their investments in the business will payoff eventually and I am happy to hold for dividends for the time being.

FIS (Fidelity National Information Services): They are heavily involved with payments industry. They help with accepting payments, banking software and a lot more within the finance industry. Their solutions are sticky and the company has been growing dividend fast. They paused the dividend growth during the pandemic which I think is sign of a prudent leadership. But at a 2.70% starting yield I think it could be a good buy!

MDT (Medtronic PLC): They are a massive company in healthcare space. Medical devices is a sticky business. Doctors tend to stick with what has worked so far and are hesitant to recommend something new. a starting yield of 3.5% and dividend raises in high single digits was something I could not refuse.

O (Realty Income): Well STOR Corp(STOR) got bought out this year. So I ended up moving some of those funds to O. Still on the lookout to buy another REIT so that my REIT bucket stays full.

ORCL (Oracle Corporation) : Oracle got left behind on the cloud infrastructure and transformation business by AWS, Microsoft and Google. But off late they are growing their cloud related revenues fast. I know their ERP business is sticky and they have a lot of enterprise clients who will be looking to move to the cloud in coming years. That is a lot of new avenues to sell a lot more cloud products to them. Oracle is not very reliable in growing dividends year over year. But they do a lot of buybacks which help make you a bigger owner in the company.

VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF) : I had been buying very less VTI in 2021 at all time highs. But 2022 gave me a lot of opportunity to add to my VTI position. As you know I am big believer in index investing.

VFC (VF Corp): VF Corp has grown dividends for 48 years. They have been having issues with inventory, debt in 2022. This has resulted in their stock price cratering to unimaginable levels. However I still like Vans, Timberland, The North Face. These are very highly reputable brands and I think VFC can still get out of this in next couple of years.

My Sells in 2022

I kept rotation on my portfolio to a minimum. The only sells I had were due to buyouts. MNR and STOR were two REIT’s that got bought out. I moved these funds to stocks in my existing portfolio mentioned above.

Performance for the year 2022

Overall I ended the year at 13% loss as compared to loss of 19% in VTI and 18.17% loss in S&P 500. I am still pretty happy with the dividend income growth as well as the performance of the portfolio.

Here is a neat timeline of dividends thrown by my DGI portfolio over the last few years which shows compounding of dividend income in action.

Plans for 2023

My first goal is same as last year’s dividend income update, reduce the percentage of dividends from NATI, MO & T by buying more of other reliable dividend stocks. Another goal of mine is to increase the total dividends by 25% in 2023. I am also planning on consistently buying more VTI. As I have said before index investing is really my favorite type of investing and it also gives dividends.

March 5, 2024 0 comments

Dividend Investing

Annual Dividend Income Update 2021

by Yoda January 1, 2023

Dividend investing for me is a long-term strategy. I like to buy great companies at good value based on historical metrics, dividend safety & future prospects. Hold them for a long time, re-invest dividends and wait for compounding to do its magic. I am a bit late at this update. 2021 year end was a pretty busy time for me personally and professionally. Here is my dividend income update for the year 2021 & what I did with my portfolio.

Dividend Income Update 2021

I made 3829 USD from my positions in 2020! It came from the following stocks:

This represents a 24% increase in dividends from 2020. Here is a percentage breakdown of dividends from all stocks in my portfolio.

One of my aims last year end was to reduce my reliance on dividend from NATI, MO & T. However, I am still getting over 45% of the total dividends from these 3 companies at end of 2021. I will have to work hard on reducing this in 2022.

If you are interested in these graphs and charts, please check out my post on how to create your own google sheet to track your portfolio across multiple accounts and create such graphs and chart.

My Buys in 2021

2021 was a pretty crazy year. Many stocks were at all time highs. We saw crazy evaluations for companies making no profit whatsoever. I did not initiate any new positions this year. All I did during the year was adding to my existing positions when I saw value.

My Sells in 2021

Nothing. Nada. This is exactly how I like it. No rotations, no sells. Just holding long term.

Performance for the year 2021

Overall I ended the year at 19% gain as compared to 25% in VTI and 26% in S&P 500. This cancels out my outperformance over the last couple of years. I am still pretty happy with the dividend income growth as well as the performance of the portfolio.

Here is a neat timeline of dividends thrown by my DGI portfolio over the last few years which shows compounding of dividend income in action.

Plans for 2022

My first goal is to reduce the percentage of dividends from NATI, MO & T by buying more of other reliable dividend stocks. Another goal of mine is to increase the total dividends by another 25% in 2022. I am also planning on consistently buying more VTI. As I have said before index investing is really my favorite type of investing and it also gives dividends.

January 1, 2023 0 comments

Investing

IPO Process & how to invest in IPO

by Yoda January 10, 2021

2020 has been an interesting year. On one hand we had the pandemic wreaking a havoc on economy & people of most countries. On the other hand, we saw so many IPO’s happen in such a choppy market. I would have imagined companies might be hesitant to go public earlier. But we have seen the exact opposite. With this in mind, I wanted to walk through all steps of an ipo process. This can help you to understand how IPO’s work. At the end I also discuss how to invest in IPO’s at offering price before it opens to everyone in market.

What is an IPO?

By default, most companies are privately held. They could obtain funding from family, founders, private equity investors, venture capitalists etc. Most companies start this way. Then they start growing, making more revenue year after year.

Eventually they reach a stage where they want to get more capital to grow further. Private investors until this point might want to cash out. Get rewarded for their initial investments etc. Sometimes it’s to just bring down debt, compete better, reward employees etc. At this point the private company would try to go public. This act of going public from a private status is the quintessential IPO process.

As part of ipo process, the private company can choose to issue/sell a portion(20-30%) of their company and raise cash/capital. Whatever be the reason and how much ever be the portion a company wants to list, they go through an ipo process which we will discuss next.

IPO Process Timeline

T-12 Months

Hire Underwriters

These are firms like Goldman, Morgan Stanley etc. which provide a team of accountants and managers to guide the private company through the ipo process. They will set the accurate price at which to sell shares, make sure everything happens according to SEC regulations.

T-12 Months

T-(3-12 Months)

Regulatory Filings

After underwriting banks are chosen, they need to file multiple documents. Biggest one is the S-1 statement. This has information about past audit financial statements. Company and business overview, risk factors etc. This usually happens about 3 months before the IPO date. This document also gets changed during the next steps as more information becomes clear. SEC’s job is to make sure there is no inaccurate information before approving these documents.

T-(3-12 Months)

T- (2-3 Weeks)

IPO Roadshow

Private company & the underwriters give presentations to institutional investors (hedge funds, pension funds, banks, credit unions etc). Since they have much more capital to buy more quantity of shares of the private company. They might also put these presentations online for retail investors (like me & you) to look at. This step is all about creating a buzz. Gauging the level of interest/demand. At the end underwrites have an idea about where to price the IPO and how many shares to sell.

T- (2-3 Weeks)

T-1 Day

Pricing

At this stage of ipo process the underwriters and private company come up with an effective date. The date on which shares will start trading publicly. A day before effective date, they also come up with the price at which shares will be sold and how many. This depends on success or failure of roadshow.
The main goal of the underwriters is to make sure they price it high enough so that private company gets enough money by selling the shares. At the same time, there is still possibility of them going up so that retail investors like me and you buy them once its public. So, creating a demand. This usually happens a day before the effective date.

T-1 Day

Allocation

Underwrites will meet with their clients like brokers, banks and hedge funds who will express interest in buying big number of shares of the private company during ipo process. The brokers and banks in turn would have asked their biggest clients to give them an indication of interest on how many shares they want to buy(during roadshow or soon after).
Soon after pricing the IPO, these brokers will ask their biggest clients who earlier gave an interest to buy, to confirm if they want to purchase these IPO shares at the offering price determined by the underwriter. If they say yes, then their interest gets converted to an order and their broker tries to get them the shares allocated at offering price.

T-1 Day

IPO! (Effective Date/ Offering Date)

Going Public!

The effective date/offering date is the first time when the private company starts trading publicly. If the underwriters created enough buzz, priced the shares appropriately, you get demand from the market which results in a pop on the prices at opening. Usually opening price is little higher that the offering price. This is usually when you and me get to buy the new public company stock.

IPO! (Effective Date/ Offering Date)

T + 25 Days

Stabilization

Now this is usually about a 25-day period after the IPO effective date. During this period, underwriters can manipulate the market price. Let’s say if the offering price was 20$ and company issued 20million shares. Now, if there is not enough demand, the stock price may start going below 20$. This doesn’t bode well for newly public company. The underwriters have the option to issue 23 million shares (3million extra). If the price doesn’t go up, they can place a purchase order to create additional demand to drive price upwards or keep it at 20$. This is a very short-term action and only allowed within first few days of a company being public.

T + 25 Days

How do retail investors get in at Offering Price during IPO Process?

As you can see the IPO process is geared to sell shares to institutional investors. They have the biggest pockets and bring more fees to brokers and banks. Without them buying the large number of shares of the private company, there is not much demand us retail investors can fulfill. However, for some IPO’s underwriter might issue 90% of the shares for institutional and another 10% for retail investors. This completely depends on the underwriter, number of shares they want to issue, demand etc. When this happens there is a very small chance retail investors will get to buy some IPO stock at offering price. In the above-mentioned IPO process, this happens before and right after pricing stage. You need to make sure you do the following:

Need to have an account with a broker that has access to IPO’s. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citi & J. P Morgan are the biggest underwriters. So, having a brokerage account at one of these places helps. Last I checked, Schwab doesn’t offer any IPO’s. Fidelity does have a deal to allow retail investors to get in with a few underwriters.
After this, you need to check with your broker if you need to apply and what are the requirements to participate in IPO’s. Fidelity requires you to have from 100-500K in assets with them.
If you are eligible, when the S-1 comes out, its possible your broker asks you to show your interest. At this point, you can say you want x number of shares. This is just expressing interest. Its not an order.
Then on the pricing date/effective date, the broker can send you another notification with the offering price and asking you to confirm your interest. This is when it becomes an order. Then overnight the broker will try and get you the shares at offering price. You may or may not get same number as your order. All depends on how many shares your broker had available.
You are still getting in before the stock is available to normal public next day. So, there is a chance you get to ride a pop that most people expect. But, remember its possible shares can go down if the IPO was a bust and then you are left holding your allotted shares with some loss.

Buying pre-IPO shares in secondary market with services like Equity Zen/SharesPost/Second Market

This is lesser known, way more risky way of obtaining shares in pre-ipo private companies on secondary market. In most cases, these 3rd party companies invest on your behalf. They have their own rules like you have to be an accredited investor, lock your money for 2-5 years. Some have a minimum like 10K USD to invest etc. Most of the times these also have 5+ % in fees etc. So be very aware of the risks when going this route. Here are some reviews of Equity Zen, Second Market.

Important dates to remember just after IPO

Quiet Period

Usually after the IPO, SEC requires analysts some of which might be of the underwriting banks to not publish any research reports for 20-30 days. This avoids any chance of them publishing rosy reports to drive the price higher in initial days of trading.

Lockup Expiration

During the ipo process, underwriters and management of the company might choose a 3 to 24 months period during which employees, insiders /early investors cannot sell their shares. Each IPO has its own lockup period. However, employees and insiders rush to sell shares as soon as the lock up window expires. This creates a selling pressure on the stock.

My thoughts on IPO’s

As we have seen through out the IPO process timeline, each stage is geared towards making as much money as possible for the private company. The more money they get, more commissions underwriters get. Institutional investors get the shares at offering price and very few high net worth individuals might get some allocation at offering price. Everyone like me and you will mostly have the option to only buy it in public markets on offering date at open price.

Not only this, but in recent years private equity investors have funded private companies for long without going public. They pump in millions and billions of dollars in companies to take their valuations to multiple billions of dollars. Uber IPO’ed at around 70 billion. Alibaba at 230 billion. Facebook at 104 billion. Most of these companies fell in value after their IPO’s. Then regained afterwards. Contrast this to CMG which IPO’ed at 540 million in 2006. IPO’ing at smaller valuation allowed investors to get in and reap rewards in the long run. Its grown more than 20 times its IPO valuation. But for BABA and FB to grow 20 plus times would mean them reaching more than 2 trillion in valuation.

So my approach with most IPO’s has been to pass on them especially in first few days/months. Let the lockup expire. Then see if I want to invest or not. What is your approach to IPO’s ? Let me know in comments below.

Embed from Getty Images

January 10, 2021 0 comments

Dividend Investing

DGI Portfolio Updates

by Yoda January 10, 2021

I have been tracking my Dividend Growth Investing (DGI) portfolio for 3 years now & publishing since 2. I check up on my portfolio once every quarter. I wanted to present it in a way that is easy to understand and helps look at the benefits of dividend investing over the long term. Presenting a timeline of dividends my DGI portfolio kicks every quarter.

January 5, 2025

ANNUAL DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE 2024

8535$ in 2024 dividend income! Performance against S&P 500 & my plans for 2025…

January 5, 2025

March 7, 2024

ANNUAL DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE 2023

5944$ in 2023 dividend income! Performance against S&P 500 & my plans for 2024…

March 7, 2024

March 5, 2024

ANNUAL DIVIDEND INCOME UPDATE 2022

4817$ in 2022 dividend income! Performance against S&P 500 & my plans for 2023…

March 5, 2024

January 1, 2023

Annual Dividend Income Update 2021

3829$ in 2021 dividend income! Performance against S&P 500 & my plans for 2022…

January 1, 2023

January 10, 2021

Annual Dividend Income Update 2020

3085$ in 2020 dividend income! Performance against S&P 500 & my plans for 2021…

January 10, 2021

October 3, 2020

Quarterly Dividend Update: Q3 2020

753$ in Q3 2020 quarterly dividend income & No Sells! Check out any new stocks…

October 3, 2020

July 5, 2020

Quarterly Dividend Update: Q2 2020

727$ in Q2 2020 quarterly dividend income! Check out stocks I bought or any sells…

July 5, 2020

Feel free to click on any event on the timeline to read more details about that quarter. I also created a month over month dividends over time graph. It helps me visualize compounding effect of my DGI portfolio. You can see how dividends have increased every month over month, every year like clockwork!

Here is the latest sector breakdown of my DGI portfolio holdings at end of 2020:

Check out how you can create your own dividend tracking google sheet with graphs and charts shown here.

January 10, 2021 0 comments

Dividend Investing

Annual Dividend Income Update 2020

by Yoda January 10, 2021

Dividend investing for me is a long-term strategy. I like to buy great companies at good value based on historical metrics, dividend safety & future prospects. Hold them for a long time, re-invest dividends and wait for compounding to do its magic. 2020 was a crazy year! Market saw a 33% drop in March. Followed by a rally which saw S&P 500 return 18% for the year 2020. We saw so many stocks double or triple in space of 9 months! It is very difficult to keep on your dividends path when you see high growth/speculative stocks triple in 9 months. Here is my dividend income update for the year 2020 & what I did with my portfolio.

Dividend Income Update 2020

I made 3085 USD from my positions in 2020! It came from the following stocks:

This represents a 46% increase in dividends from 2019. Here is a percentage breakdown of dividends from all stocks in my portfolio.

As you can see, 3 stocks (NATI, T & MO) made up about 45% of my dividends in 2020. Even when I did my 2019 dividend income update, these 3 stocks did make about 45-47% of dividends that year. I have had the goal to bring down this percentage, however good value at various times throughout the year forced me to keep buying some of these stocks and so the percentage of their contributions remains the same.

If you are interested in these graphs and charts, please check out my post on how to create your own google sheet to track your portfolio across multiple accounts and create such graphs and chart.

My Buys in 2020

As I mentioned earlier it is very difficult to keep on your path when you see stocks doubling or tripling in a 9 month period. You always want to jump on the bandwagon in such cases but resisting is very hard. Keeping this in mind, I only bought INTC (Intel), MNR (Monmouth Real Estate) & HON (Honeywell) as new positions during the year. All were bought at good valuations as compared to their history. I wish to keep adding to these companies in future & I have no doubt they will help me grow my dividend portfolio.

Apart from the new positions, I kept adding new money to most of my existing positions through out the year except for TGT, QCOM, XOM, PEP, LW & BLK. All stocks did have dividends reinvested into them.

I also had the opportunity to keep adding to my VTI position which was a goal of mine at beginning of 2020.

My Sells in 2020

I sold out of GIS & TROW early in the year. They were relatively small positions in my portfolio & I wanted to focus on higher dividend growth rate companies and wanted to focus on lesser positions.

Apart from this, I also sold a bit of NATI, KTB to reduce position sizes whenever they got bigger than what I want them to be.

Dividend Cuts/Suspensions

Pandemic created havoc on people & businesses through most of 2020. It is natural to expect some of the companies to cut their dividends and come under a lot of un-natural stress. It doesn’t mean we cut those companies from our portfolio. I did have Disney Inc. (DIS) & KTB (Kontoor Brands) who cut their dividends in 2020. But I held on to both of them. Bought more of them at various price points. I am happy to report that both have more than doubled from my lowest purchase point during the year. KTB even brought back its dividend albeit at a lower level.

Not only this, but I also started selling covered calls for income on my KTB position which helped me make about 130$ on my position despite them paying dividends for only 2 quarters in 2020.

Performance for the year 2020

I ended the year at 22% as compared 18% from S&P 500 across my roth and traditional brokerage accounts. I did have a few non dividend income paying stocks that also helped me to beat S&P in those accounts. But point is by being consistent, having less rotation, mostly buying and holding & investing in great quality dividend paying companies it is possible to come out ahead and also create a good income stream.
Here is a neat timeline of dividends thrown by my DGI portfolio over the last few years which shows compounding of dividend income in action.

Plans for 2021

Buy more dividend growth stocks in our roth accounts. Currently, I get 45% dividends from 3 stocks in my portfolio. I will try to increase my existing positions in some holdings. I am also planning on consistently buying more VTI. As I have said before index investing is really my favorite type of investing and it also gives dividends. I also plan to start creating such reports only annually instead of a quarterly cadence before. I want to focus more on bringing quality content to this blog. Have more articles on investing philosophy, concepts and less on just stock ideas or my portfolio details. Hoping this becomes more useful to you in the long run.

How was 2020 for your portfolio? Please let me know in the comments.

January 10, 2021 0 comments

Dividend Investing Investing

How to make a dividend tracking spreadsheet

by Yoda December 11, 2020

I am sure you would agree when I say tracking your dividends and portfolio performance is one of the most challenging aspects of dividend investing. Most excel formulas work for few months before having issues with data providers leaving you helpless.

What if we get the data directly from the source? IEX is an exchange that provides an Application Programming Interface(api) to get dividend data for free and reliably.

In this blog post we will make use of a google sheets, latest IEX cloud api and google finance api to create your own dividend tracking sheet.

So head over to google sheets and start a new sheet to follow along.

Just give me your version of dividend tracking spreadsheet

FYI if you do not want to go through the whole process of creating a new sheet from scratch, adding formulas, formatting it etc, you can just go to the last section and download my own google sheet. Then you can use it to do dividend tracking of your own portfolio. For other’s who want to be more adventurous, please follow along.

Stock Data sheet

Let’s first work on the Stock Data sheet, this sheet will have info like stock ticker, current price, current yield, yield on cost, quantity you own, etc. So, on the top row, let’s have these headers on a new google sheet: (I added things like Ticker, Name, Quote, Avg Cost per Share, Cost Basis, Dividend Yield, Dividend income, PE ratio, eps etc.)

Our next step is to get data populated in this sheet. in order to do so, we will make use of google finance function in sheets. Basically syntax for getting anything from google finance function is:

GOOGLEFINANCE(ticker, [attribute], [start_date], [end_date|num_days], [interval])

So, the ticker name is mandatory and after that you can have 1 or more attributes.

Going back to our sheet, you need to populate the column A with ticker of your stock. To populate its name, you can use =GOOGLEFINANCE(A2,”name”) under B2 shown below

Similarly, you can use formulas like given below to get other details about the respective stock:

Function & Syntax	Description
=googlefinance(A2,”price”)	To get the latest price
=googlefinance(A2,”pe”)	To get the Price earnings ratio
=googlefinance(A2,”eps”)	To get the earnings per share
=googlefinance(A2,”high52″)	To get 52 week high price
=googlefinance(A2,”low52″)	To get 52 week low price
=googlefinance(A2,”marketcap”)	To get market cap of the stock

After I fill some of these values for my first row, I get the following:

When it comes to quantity purchased, avg cost basis per share, total cost basis, those depend from person to person and these values can easily be obtained from your brokerage account. After you get those you can very easily fill the following using formulas mentioned here:

Column in Excel Formula

Market Value =C2*D2

Change $ =G2-F2

Change % =(H2/F2)*100

After that, our sheet looks something like this:
Now coming to dividends, I have observed Google’s function is not that great. Its hit or miss. Sometimes it shows dividends sometimes it doesn’t. However, I found another api we can use to get the data related to dividend columns which is more reliable than Google’s api. Its called IEX cloud API. Up until mid June 2019 they used to allow to get the dividend data for free without any registration. But now they require you to register and get an api key.
So, lets try to do that. Head over to the IEX Cloud registration page and create account.
Next choose the START plan which is free. It provides 500K requests to the API every month which is more than enough for a pretty big portfolio. Even if you request to get data from it multiple times a day every day for the whole month.
Verify your account from your email and then login to the iex cloud api account. After verification, log on and from the home page of iex cloud api account, head over to API Tokens section as shown:
Under the API Tokens section you will find your key which you can use in google sheets. Copy the publishable token as shown using the copy button. Now here I have 3 options to get dividend amount into your sheet:

Current Dividend (Easy to setup)

In this method, you will need to copy this code and paste it into the script editor of your google sheet as shown:

Once you do this, you are mostly done. The formula to use this script in a cell to get the dividend amount is:

=if(isblank(A11),,GETDIVIDEND2($A11,”xxxx”))

Again, you will need to replace the xxxx with your personalized api key from the last step. A11 will be the field of the ticker you are trying to get dividend info for. This should get you the current dividend for most US listed stocks. For e.g. for AAPL this will return the current latest dividend. I wrote a function that uses your key to get the dividend from IEX cloud api. Then use that and the dividend frequency to get the annual dividend amount.

Sometimes a company has just announced the most recent raise and not paid it out. In such cases, IEX returns the trailing 12 month dividend. For some stocks like BUD which pays out twice a year and has payouts where one is larger and next is smaller, this might not work. For these 2 use cases, you can take a look at the next method. Please let me know if you come across any other stocks for which this script fails below in comments. I will try and improve the script code to account for any issues you may notice. This particular formula usage is shown in line 2-4 of my sheet if you download it. Do remember to replace the xxxx with your API Key, since IEX no longer allows users to share the same key to get this data.

Current Dividend Scraping Finviz (Easiest)

In this method, we will just use the IMPORTHTML function google provides. We will then get the dividend paid out annually from a finance website and populate it in appropriate column as shown. We use the following formula in this approach:

=REGEXEXTRACT(SUBSTITUTE(index(IMPORTHTML(“http://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=”&A3,“table”, 10),7,2),“*”,“”),“(.*) .*”)

sometimes the formula doesn’t get copied properly. So try to enter this formula manually in your google sheet.

where A3 has the ticker of the stock. I have used this in the row 5-8 of my google sheet provided. You may use this method whenever the first one fails(like in case of stocks like BUD). This method also gets the latest forward looking dividend yield just like the last one.

Current Dividend Scraping Stock Analysis (Easiest)

In this method, we will just use the IMPORTXML function google provides. We will then get the dividend paid out annually from StockAnalysis.com and populate it in appropriate column as shown. We use the following formula in this approach:

=IMPORTXML(“https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/”&A9&”/dividend/”,”//*[@id=’main’]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div[2]/div”)

sometimes the formula doesn’t get copied properly. So try to enter this formula manually in your google sheet.

where A9 has the ticker of the stock. I have used this in the row 9-12 of my google sheet provided. This method also gets the latest forward looking dividend yield just like the last one.

You can get dividend for etf’s based in USA using the below formula with slight tweaks: =IMPORTXML(“https://stockanalysis.com/etf/”&A7&”/dividend/”,”//*[@id=’main’]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div[2]/div”)

If you want to get dividends for stocks listed in TSX try the formula below: =IMPORTXML(“https://stockanalysis.com/quote/tsx/SU/dividend/”,”//*[@id=’main’]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div[2]/div”)

You can use any of the three methods for any number of rows in your google sheet depending on what works or doesn’t. I will make sure at least one of the methods mentioned above works at any given time.

With the information about dividend per share, you can easily get information about columns on dividends as follows:

Column Formula

Annual Div Income =D2*J2

Yield on Cost =(K2/F2) format as percent

Annual Yield =(J2/C2) format as percent
In addition to this, I have 2 columns that I added at the end, Actual Shares Purchased & Actual Cost Basis. These are completely optional and will be used to calculate your real returns on original investment. So, if you do DRIP, this will be very helpful. These columns must be filled manually, and you need to go to your brokerage website to find this info. For instance, I have some WFC stock which I bought 3-4 years back and turned DRIP on. Now last year I bought some more WFC stock out of my own pocket so my WFC holdings in my broker account look like this:So, what I know is all my DRIP transactions are anything with fractional shares in quantity column and my whole number quantity transactions are made with actual out of pocket money. Therefore, I just add up the quantity columns for whole numbers to get the Actual Shares Purchased column. I add up the cost basis for those transactions to get my entry for the Actual Cost Basis column. Important thing to remember is you must update these 2 columns any time you increase position in a stock with actual money or sell some of your positions. Those transactions will affect values in these 2 columns. When you buy any new stock, value will be easy to calculate first time. It should be same as D(quantity) and F(Cost basis). So, ideally you shouldn’t be trading much and this update will be very rare.
And now, our first row is completely done:
Now, in order to add new stocks, your work keeps getting smaller and easier. For instance, let’s add some tickers like BLK, DIS, MO, PSX,SO,QCOM, VFC, ZBH etc.
After adding the tickers from your portfolio, all you need to do is drag down from bottom right of the cell of first row in a column. That will basically call the same formula for that column for all your tickers. I have highlighted the columns for which you can do this. After doing it for all these columns here is what we get:
Now enter information in columns D, E, F, P,Q and R in that order. Rest of the columns you can again drag down as show in previous screenshot. So now we are starting to get all of our data in the stockdata sheet.
Now, lets add some totals and calculate returns and format the table to get some colors in:Notice how the return incl. dividends is a tad bit higher mostly because of some highlighted rows where I assumed, I bought some shares after receiving dividends using DRIP. Please also note these are just numbers I made up, they might not be factually correct, but this is just to give an example of how you can use the last 2 columns in the sheet. This is the end to the stockdata sheet for our dividend tracking.

Pie Chart showing your Sector allocation

Now that our stockdata sheet is ready lets do some graphs. Let’s say you want to be aware of which sectors you are allocated into and how much of your total portfolio.

Lets add a new sheet called sectorallocation and add the sectors you want to track as shown:
Now, under the percentage column, in order to get the correct allocation we are going to add this formula for utilities := ((SUMIF(StockData!P2:P12,”Utilities”,StockData!G2:G12))/StockData!G13)*100
What it will do is, see the sectors we assigned in our main stockdata sheet for any of the rows say Utilities, if so add the values in those rows up and divide by the total value to get the percentage allocated to that sector. Similarly, do this for all the other rows. You can copy the formula, but you will need to replace the Utilities with the sector of the row. So, we get this:
Now, lets add a pie chart to the sheet and add your data ranges from A2:A11,B2:B11. After that, we get the following:
At the end you get a pretty nice pie chart showing your allocation in different sectors. This can help you be aware in what sectors you are more exposed and if you decide to buy a new stock, you can see what sector you are very less exposed to and maybe look at a company there.

Monthly dividend tracking sheet

So far, we created our stockdata sheet which shows our yield on cost, annual dividends, return with and without dividends etc. Our sectorallocation sheet shows how much or less are you exposed to various sectors. In addition to these, let’s create a sheet to track our monthly dividends. This sheet will help us to create more data and understand our monthly cash flows from dividends. It can also eventually allow you to plot your dividend gains over few years/months of investing. You can see yourself on your way to living off dividends.

To do this, add a new sheet and enter the columns as shown till December:Now for the first 2 columns, get the data from your StockData sheets and populate them. Once that’s done, now you need to manually fill in what dividends you got every month from different stocks. This process can be a bit time consuming. Although, you should be able to get all the data from your broker. On my broker’s website, I just login and go to the transactions screen. Then filter to only show dividend transactions. This allows me to go through a few months of transactions at a time and fill this sheet quickly. In addition, we can also enter information for 2018 and previous years if possible, in new sheets. However, this depends on if you can get the data from your broker for previous years. Then using that data, we can add some YOY(Year Over Year) percentage increases for your dividend stocks as shown:
Now, this gives you better idea of how fast your dividend is growing every month. You can even play around with some extra rows and add Year end increase in dividends year over year for the full total etc. Now lets create a graph to show dividends received form companies in Q1 2019. Lets add a bar chart to the sheet for 2019 Monthly dividends and use the following data ranges:
Again, you can play around with the data ranges to change this chart from quarterly to annual ranges. That way you can get different type of graphs. Please feel free to check out my real money dividend portfolio which uses this google sheet in practice.

Check out this article on creating your own dividend tracking sheet using IEX and google api's. Makes it look pretty easy! Click to Share

Dividends over time sheet

If you have been using this dividend tracker for a couple of years, you will have enough data for a new chart. You can track your dividends month over month and year over year. This allows us to see the dividend compounding effect over long term.

Add a new sheet titled MonthYearSumm. Next we will just copy data from our other sheets like 2020Monthly, 2019 Monthly into the following format:
Again remember, you need to copy the monthly dividends you made over past years in the table above. Once you have filled in the table, you can then create a new chart of type column chart with no stacking.
You can use the customize tab to change look and feel on the chart. Once finished, the new chart looks like this:
As you can see, this chart allows you to look at your progress over time. You can see your dividends increasing month over month, year over year. Really gives perspective into long term compounding effect of dividends if you stay the course.

OK this is great! Now give me this sheet!

I do realize making your own excel from scratch can be daunting even with the above given steps. So, in case you just want a copy of the sample google sheet. Please enter your email below and I will send you the sheet with easy to follow instructions on how you can set it up for your portfolio. Again, I think if you are buying individual stocks for dividends, its utmost important to track and measure your performance. So you know how you perform against the market and can see the effects of compounding in real time. I usually update my personal sheet once a quarter and publish my quarterly results on this blog.

If you liked this article, it will be great help if you can share it with your social circle using any of the share buttons on the post.

Also check out how I get my financial news using a free Barron’s & wsj subscription.

December 11, 2020 18 comments

Dividend Investing

Kontoor Brands: Dividend income stock

by Yoda October 8, 2020

Spin off’s present one of the most interesting opportunity for investing. They might have some irrational selling which will move the stock price downwards. Both Joel Greenblatt from Magic Formula Investing fame and Peter Lynch in One up on Wall Street mention to keep an eye on spin offs for best opportunities to invest. I believe there is something similar going on with Kontoor Brands, a recent spin off from VF Corp.

Allow me to introduce Kontoor Brands (KTB)

Kontoor Brands (KTB) is a newly created spin off from V.F Corporation (VFC). Its business is selling Wrangler, Lee, Rock & Republic jeans as well as operating VF Outlet business. VFC spun off this business in May 2019 to focus on their fast-growing adventure brands business. They wanted to focus more on them and decided to spin the jeans segment off as KTB. So Kontoor Brands started trading on 23rd May for about 40$ a share and then fell to about 26$ a share by June 25th.

Why did Kontoor Brands fall so much?

Irrational selling. Just like most big stocks, VFC had lots of institutional owners of its stock. If you look at Morningstar’s ownership details tab for VFC, you will find a huge amount of Large cap/dividend growth-based funds holding VFC stock.

You can see above most funds are large cap based funds. When KTB was spun off and started trading, its market cap was about 2-2.5 billion dollars. It was not part of SP500, neither was it considered a large cap company, nor had they made any official dividend announcement. On the contrary, KTB was a very boring, small-mid cap, non SP500, high dividend yield company with not a fast growing dividend. These large caps, SP500 focused, or dividend growth funds, would have been forced to sell most/all of their KTB stock. Since the new KTB stock did not follow any rules set by the fund for their holdings. I think this is the prime reason KTB stock took a dive after beginning to trade as an individual company. You can also see huge volumes of buy, sells in the first few days when mostly funds were selling:

The daily volume is far less now, 3 months after the spin off:

Management seems great and very shareholder friendly

KTB management has been touting the dividend policy of the company. Even before the spin off, the management spoke about a very strong dividend policy. Focusing on dividends as a major factor in total shareholder return. They already said in their roadshow, they planned to maintain a 60% target payout ratio. They even mentioned they plan to initiate a 2.24$ per share dividend equaling about 5+% of their 40-42$ trading price when it was spun off. So, when the price kept falling and a dividend was not announced, investors became skeptic of the planned dividend. I believe this contributed to further falling of the price. However investor’s fears were disproved when KTB announced a 2.24$ dividend per share on July 23rd 2019. Yield around 7%+ as of close on Jul 23rd.

I think this really speaks about the quality of management. Management promised something and delivered! The dividend is always at discretion of the management and the board. Management could have reduced the 2.24$ payout they mentioned before the spin off. They could have kept it at 5% of 26-28$. However, they followed through and delivered on the 2.24$ amount as previously mentioned.

Most of the KTB management has come straight from their parent company. The CEO, CFO and VP of supply chain all worked for VF Corp before moving to KTB. I see this as a great sign and shows confidence of the leadership in Kontoor Brands.

Now let’s talk about financials

Revenues for Kontoor Brands have been decreasing over the past 3 years and was one of the reasons VFC wanted to spin off this division. Revenues have decreased from about 2.92 to 2.76 billion dollars since 2016. This was mainly due to challenges in NA over retailer bankruptcies (Sears in 2018), India demonetization and exiting business in Argentina. Management expects them to decrease to 2.5 billion dollars in 2019. But then from 2020 on wards they expect for revenues to start growing at low-mid single digit rate.

For the most recent Q2 2019 quarter, the adjusted EPS was .96$ a share. You can check out there Q2 earnings report right here.

The interesting thing you would notice is that they have the word adjusted mentioned at a lot of places. Adjusted EPS (0.96) is also higher than the GAAP EPS (0.67). But there is not much concern here. We need to remember that this is practically KTB’s first earnings report as an independent company. They are focusing a lot on restructuring currently. As part of Q2 2019, they ended up exiting business in Turkey & Argentina which were poorly performing. Changed business models to distribution from direct in Chile, Russia & Israel. Closing some factories in Mexico that used to produce goods for VFC.

All these steps cost money and KTB is excluding these costs and revenues from adjusted numbers as one time charges. They plan to continue investing in restructuring throughout 2021. This is kind of needed for a newly spun off company since this will eventually help them to cut a lot of costs which will reflect on the bottom-line soon. In fact KTB management expects to start seeing result from the restructuring program in second half of 2019 itself.

Current PE for KTB is 32.20/(.96*4) = 8.41 on an adjusted basis & 32.20/(.67*4) = 12.01 on GAAP basis.

Dividend Safety of Kontoor Brands (KTB)

According to adjusted EPS, payout ratio comes to be about .56/.96 = 58.3% for the quarter. According to GAAP EPS, payout ratio is .56/.67 = 83.5%. That’s a little high but as I mentioned, this reflects extra one time costs company has had to bear for restructuring. As we move forward into 2020 & beyond, cost savings will be realized and one should expect costs of operations to go down lower thereby improving the payout ratios on GAAP basis.

Based on free cash flow, its 53.39-9.3 = 44.09 Million in free cash flow. This results in (56.64*.56)/44.09 = 71% payout ratio on cash flow. Which is not bad at all and again this percentage should improve with the restructuring changes.

Interest Coverage ratio = GAAP EBIT / Annual interest payments which comes to about (52.15 *4)/60 million = 3.4 times. I annualized the 52.4 million EBIT to get the annual. On adjusted basis its (74*4)/60 million = 4.93 times.

This ratio just tells us if the company will have any extra money left after paying interest payments. Ideally 5 and over is better. I think on adjusted basis, KTB is almost there. On a GAAP basis they might take a couple of years to get there, but I am confident they will.

I expect all ratios mentioned above to improve with each passing quarter as Kontoor Brands management keeps executing on their restructuring plan. I will keep looking at their financials with each quarter to see if they improve or not.

Risks

Concentration of Revenues

Walmart accounts for about 33% of revenues in USA which is pretty huge considering they generate 73-80% of their total revenues in USA. In fact, 53% of revenues come only from 5 retailers in USA. So maintaining those relationships is very key to Kontoor Brands.

Lack of diversity

At the end of the day they mostly sell jeans. They do sell some shorts and some shirts, but most revenues are generated by the jeans segment.

Too much debt

As part of the spin off, 1 billion dollars in debt was taken out by KTB. That’s pretty huge. This is mostly long-term debt and company is in a very defensible industry selling jeans and related products. So the debt is a big concern with the juicy dividend yield. However only 20% of revenues in Q2 were from outside USA. So there is room for far more growth internationally where management said, they are now focusing. Lee is already number 1 jeans brand in China and KTB plans to introduce Wrangler in China in early 2020. Plus with all the operational efficiencies realizing over next 18-24 months, I can see the company focusing more on cash flow and bringing down the debt. They already paid off 50 million this quarter Q2 2019.

Still a new dividend company

Ideally most dividend investors like to look at multiple years of prior data. Dividend history, sustainability/safety, historical pe ratios etc. before making a decision on dividend stock. However KTB is still a very new company. They just declared their first dividend. So there is not much historical data to look at which might put off some investors.

Conclusion

Peter Lynch and Greenblatt do mention, special situations like spin offs create interesting opportunities to invest. They also mention there is huge imperative not just for the spun off company but also for the parent to see the spun off company succeed. If the spun off company fails it also reduces trust in the management of the parent company since it destroys shareholder value. VFC has always mentioned spin off will unlock lots of value for both companies and would allow KTB to focus more on gaining operational efficiencies and growing in jeans segment. This is just what KTB has been presenting and speaking about since day 1 of spin off.

I think KTB has been way irrationally oversold. The company has already declared dividends as they had been saying. They also have a good plan to achieve efficiencies in operations and cost. This is already showing signs of good management quality. They operate in a very boring but defensive jeans wear segment. They only had 11% drop in revenues during the recession. Management has mentioned multiple times about focusing on dividends being major component in shareholder return. They even reiterated this during the most recent Q2 2019 earnings call. This is just the type of dividend income company investors should like for the long run.

I received a handful of shares of KTB as part of the VFC spin off. After studying the company, I decided to increase my position. I would add more if I see their financials improving in another 2-3 quarters. Here is my proof of purchase which is also updated in my dividend investing portfolio.

UPDATE

Until February of this year, things looked pretty good on Kontoor Brands. It reached a high of 41.87$ and was giving out dividends. However, the COVID pandemic resulted in them cutting the dividend. Most dividend based etf’s were forced to sell their Kontoor Brands holdings. So we saw the effect of forced selling for dividend cuts this time around. Stock went to as low as 14$. So far I have kept buying despite the cut. Management even spoke about possibility of reinstating dividends in Q4 of 2020 if debt and bank covenants improve by then. Listening to calls management does seem to be working towards reinstating dividends. Not sure when it will happen but I like what they have been saying so far. I also learnt about selling covered calls for income. I did this with my Kontoor Brands stock position and I still own the stock.

Disclaimer: The above are just my opinions expressed in the article. I am not your fiduciary or an investment advisor. Do not consider this as investment advice to you. This article is just for informational and entertainment purposes. Also please note that this article was published on Aug 25th. Many numbers would have changed when you are reading it.

References:

Q2 Earnings Release

Investor Relations KTB

Curreen Capital Q2 letter

October 8, 2020 2 comments

Dividend Investing

Quarterly Dividend Update: Q3 2020

by Yoda October 3, 2020

Dividend Investing for me is a long-term strategy. I like to buy great companies at good value based on historical metrics and dividend safety. Hold them for a long time, re-invest dividends and wait for compounding to do its magic. Most countries are trying to open their economies and putting COVID in rearview mirror. However, cases in most places are increasing. A US election is also looming which could cause wild swings in the market. Despite all this, Q3 2020 just saw the market going up and up backed by the ever growing tech stocks. However I haven’t changed my plan at all. I am planning to keep buying stocks and ETF’s. Here is my Q3 2020 quarterly dividend update:

Total: $753 for Q3 2020 (up 28% from Q3 2019 & up 3.5% from Q2 2020)

Here is a graphical view of the same data:

Check out my and download/make your own dividend tracking sheet here and create awesome graphs as above for free.

I recently added a new chart to my dividend tracking sheet. It allows me to see my dividends grow over long term. I have been tracking my dividends for last 3 years. Here is the result so far till Q3 2020.

As you can see, dividends have kept on growing month after month, year after year for almost 3 years now! You can see the dividends compounding very clearly in this graph.

My Buys in Q3 2020

I added to my existing open positions which I thought were at attractive valuation. I also added a new stock to my portfolio.

Added very little to my Abbvie(ABBV) position.
Added to my Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) position. You can read more about my complete research on Cisco Systems here.
I added to my position in Kontoor Brands (KTB). They had a better quarter than the last one. Plus the management is planning to give an update on the dividend reinstatement at end of Q3. This is still a long term hold for me. Full research here. I also started selling covered calls for income on side using my KTB position.
Bought some more in Monmouth Real Estate Corp. (MNR). This is a REIT that is focused on industrial properties. They only have investment grade clients like FDX, AMZN, KO, HD, RTX etc. They even collected 98-99% rent during the last 3 months. Bought some at starting yields of 6.9 % and then added a bit more during the quarter.
I also added to my position in Store Capital (STOR). Its a REIT company that rents individual standing real estate properties to a variety of tenants. They collected only 68% of rent in April but it has increase to 86% in last month. They also did not cut dividends during this time which bodes well for them.
Added to my position in Wells Fargo (WFC) in 20 & 30’s.
I added to my position to V F Corp (VFC). They have not yet cut any dividends. Plus historically VFC has been a very acquisitive company and have a very long history of paying dividends.
Also added to my position to VTI. Not as much as I should have, but I will continue doing this.

I am projecting an increase to 2900$ in forward annual dividends as compared to 2103$ I made in 2019!

My Sells in Q3 2020

NONE! I hope to continue doing this. The less I touch my portfolio, more time it gets for compounding and growing.

Thoughts about Q4 2020

Upcoming quarter will have Q3 earnings from most companies in my portfolio. We also have the US elections coming up at the end of the year. Elections have historically not been the best year for returns. Seeing as we are already positive so far this year, it will be interesting to see how much volatility we have in the last quarter. I know one thing for sure: I will keep buying stocks and ETF’s during this quarter.

Check out my complete dividend portfolio here.

Click this link for my 2019 Annual dividend income update.

October 3, 2020 0 comments

Column in Excel	Formula
Market Value	=C2*D2
Change $	=G2-F2
Change %	=(H2/F2)*100

Column	Formula
Annual Div Income	=D2*J2
Yield on Cost	=(K2/F2) format as percent
Annual Yield	=(J2/C2) format as percent