How am I doing?

Some of the questions that most of us wonder is:

How is my investment style doing?
Am I doing well?
Am I happy with my returns?

Of late those questions have been on my mind. I have every confidence with the style of investing that I have settled on. This style suits my mindset perfectly in my mind. I pick good dividend stocks with good secondary numbers and DRIP the heck out them to leverage the power of compounding.

However the logical part of myself had to ask:

"Sure your happy with the style of investing, but is it working?"

I had to know. I went back over all my statements and complied the results from the time when I started to actively manage my own investments.

The results are in:

2010 - 21.76%
2011 - 9.78%
2012(so far) - 29.79%

For a to date total annualised return of 19.06%

I guess the results so far have to be a very emphatic "Yes" to all the above questions.

I will stay the course! :-)

This was done using the very handy XIRR function of Excel - very cool. With a little time and effort I was able to put together a spreadsheet with which I will keep an ongoing tally of my progress.

Moving Forward - Ever Onward

Back in June of this past year I made the decision to unload two mReits - TWO and ANH. My basis for this was a simple realization - I did not understand how they made money. Simple really - I felt that since I could not understand what they were doing - how would I understand when they were in trouble and it was time for me to sell. I made an 18% and 11% percent profit on TWO and ANH respectively.
I had held them for less than six months and it was not a matter that they were not looking to be a good investment - I really wanted to go back to the KISS method and they were not simple investments.

I then took the proceeds of those two sales to take positions in Intel (INTC) and Pure Energy Services (PSV).

My average share cost of Intel was $27.29 and as of this writing I am down about 9% on that one, but I am not too worried about it - it's a solid company with great cash flow. DRIP over the next couple of quarters will average down that per share cost for me.

My second purchase, Pure Energy Services, worked out to a per share cost of $7.39. I was happy with this purchase as it was a company steadily growing earnings and cash flow and were paying a good dividend. As an added bonus I was just under the ex-dividend date and so I soon picked up my first dividend payment and DRIP shares.

A little over a month after my purchase of Pure Energy - they were snapped up by a bigger company out of Houston at $11.00 a share. I decided to sell out and pocketed a nice little 47.45% profit for holding the stock for just over a month - nice!

My investment style does not plan for me to flip a lot of stocks, however the chance to lock in  such a big win so fast was too good to ignore - and freed up funds to find a another long term holding.

When do you consider selling a position?

New Tack -

The other day I sold my positions in two mReits, ANH aand TWO.
I decided that since i did not really under stand how they made their money I could not really assess when the investment not no longer a good one.

So now looking to add a new position, maybe increase my bond fund holdings, or finally start building a posiion in a true Blue Chip stock, JNJ, PEP, KO, or PG

MSFT - raises it dividend by 25%!!

With so much money on the books - some 63 Billion - and a stock that looked to be stuck in the same range for the last ten years - Microsoft has been under alot of pressure to start returning more monies back to investors. They have rasied the dividend to $0.20 per share per quarter - really good news.

I am glad I decided to up my stake in MSFT on Monday - at the time it seemed to me that it was under valued and I wanted to get enough stock in hand to make use of the synthetic DRIP in my TD account.

MSFT on Barrons

Motley Fool

Hello -

Love this article from Seeking Alpha:

MSFT - set to jump?

I really like this as I picked up another 77 shares of this this morning....

Some good stories from the Web

Hello Folks -

Today I thought I would post a couple of links to some articles that I read and found interesting

The Ultimate Sustainable Dividend Portfolio

The strange tale of the Permanent Portfolio

10 Commandments For Dividend Growth Investors

And for those of us just getting started, here is great site run by the same fella that runs The Dividend Guy blog : Whatisdividend.com

DRIP math experiment

Hello Folks - it sure has been a bit of a crazy ride in the markets the last few weeks - as we are all aware.

RY.TO up well over one dollar yesterday and today down over a dollar today - no real reason for it that I can see.

As part of why I think Dividend investing is they way to go for me, I conducted a little math experiment on a spreadsheet with my KEG.UN holdings. The holding I have in this are enough for me to do the synthetic DRIP offered by TD Waterhouse, and as a result I get 1 unit each and every month, with a couple of extra dollars left over to accumulate in my account.

The assumptions of the experiment are:
1) - The stock price stays the same throughout
2) - The dividends are accumlated within the account were not DRIPped
3) - Only ran the numbers for three years

I found it interesting that by simply DRIPping my gains of three years outpaced that of Non-DRIPping by nearly 1.8% - by really doing nothing. This of course does not account for the added gains that my occur in the stock itself over that time, or for that matter any increases in the dividend itself.


Have a look: