The Good
- For the first six months I have added $4,225.57 or about 47% of the $9000 I wanted to add to my portfolio this year.
- Currently the value of my portfolio stands at $18,296.87. I have eleven different stocks and 1,036.74 shares. Current yield is 11.27%
- During the first 6 months of the year I have collected $879.24 in dividends. This is ~44% of my goal for 2018 of reaching $2,000.
- My Portfolio is made up of 5 different sectors with 45% of it in REITs.
The Bad
- I sold all my shares of CJREF and OHI because the companies either reduced or cancelled their dividends. This is the risk I take with buying high yield stocks.
- For OHI I lost around $300 and for CJREF I lost around $635 for a total of around $935. This is a large chunk of money and would have been much less if I had stop losses in place.
- My portfolio for most of the year has been red which comes from the volatility of the stocks I own and only became green for selling stocks at a loss.
The 2nd Half of 2018
Overall my portfolio is growing and I am happy with it. I believe if I keep to the pace of the 1st half of the year I should meet my goal of adding $9000 to my portfolio or come very close. I will be looking to diverse my portfolio a little bit more during the 2nd half by maybe buying a consumer product like either AT&T or Coca-Cola. We shall see, worse case I will buy them next year when I plan on buying a few more stable stocks. While I have made $879.24 so far in dividends it might be hard for me to get to $2,000 especially I after I had to sell some stock which affected my dividend income a little. While overall I still plan to hit $2500 for my forward dividend, it will be tough to receive $2000 this year so I am going to reduce this to $1900. I yet to have learn my lesson on not having stop losses and selling shares for a profit. UNIT is a great example of this. At one point I was up about $250.00 and as of the close of Friday (7/20) I am down $273.58. This is more than a $500 price swing. I am going to look into setting up exit plans for my stock so that I can at least try to buy back some stock for cheaper. I hope everybody had a great first half of the year and look forward to seeing how everybody does the second half.
Little Dividends 