November 2017 Update

General Comment
November was indeed a special month, more for personal reasons than other, right after the wedding at the end of October we left for our honeymoon and that kind of made the whole month very special! 🙂

Investment-wise of course I took a pause during the holiday, it was a great reminder of the core strategy that the portfolio follows: dividend compounding. It doesn’t require active trading (though it has to be said being more active can land you some special gains every now and then), and the time off did not affect the portfolio at all. It also showed me that the buildup is good, there are still some points to be changed but I can say that the core of the PF is behaving as planned.

I want to stress the “planned” part. I know that out there we have traders that do very good gains, higher than mine, maybe even taking less risks. On one side I am still learning and hopefully my competence and portfolio will grow in time, but on the other my plan is what matters. We’ll see in later sections that the boat is moving towards the target that I am happy with and in a way that I am comfortable with, and this is what matters.

Worldwide there hasn’t been a lot happening, times are pretty good at the moment, markets rising, consumers feeling happy and more prone to spending, international crisis are quite low. In an economic environment like this is harder to find investments to be placed, but there are opportunities if you look hard enough. I mentioned my thoughts on future crashes and the economy in the previous post, so with that in mind we get to the end of the year where more changes are bound to happen (I want to revamp my reporting, for one thing).

LH FUND

Explanation of terminology is HERE.

Month	TR	TER	YoC
11.15	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%
12.15	-3.33%	1.27%	1.13%
12.16	7.06%	2.34%	4.75%
1.17	4.76%	2.38%	4.93%
2.17	7.26%	2.53%	5.30%
3.17	8.15%	2.57%	5.82%
4.17	7.82%	2.65%	6.36%
5.17	7.59%	2.84%	7.21%
6.17	6.96%	2.89%	8.51%
7.17	6.62%	2.96%	9.17%
8.17	5.99%	3.00%	9.73%
9.17	7.36%	3.05%	10.30%
10.17	9.10%	3.11%	10.81%
11.17	9.19%	3.17%	11.19%

For the second straight month I regret to post that TER is strongly on the rise, in April I will have tax returns and I expect December TER to be jumping again (tax returns will be added to december results as they are related to the year before). Total Return of the LH Portfolio is confirming growth but at a slower pace. 9.19% is the new PF record anyhow so no reasons to be upset about anything here! Currencies played an important role as usual, the euro got stronger in November, and the “currency effect” accounted for -5.79% (TR without currency effect would be 14.98%).

YoC rises to 11.19%. Slower than previous months, but still in touch with expectations.

Dividends and Options

October scored a 1170 Euro turnover.

Dividends were 916.49 Euro (+40% vs.2016) and Options scored a 253.29 Euro (+126% vs 2016). Extremely good results for dividends, and quite decent result for the Options. Because I realized of an accountancy issue with my excel sheets this time last year, recalculating the trades down gave me a not so nice -943 euro loss in November 2016. Growing from there should have not been a problem of course (and it wasn’t) but for a moment I thought that I was going to post negative numbers in November 2017 as well, since for the second month in a row I had to roll some bad bad trades to later stages of the year. This time we had BIT:BRE1 and GME options going real bad all together they account for almost -300euro result. As usual I roll for credit so I take the hit today and will hopefully turn on the profit later in the year (or next year), this is part of the game of trading options…

I managed to place all my long calls on core stocks, so I am happy about it as it means that all my capital tied up in stocks is also working on the long calls as well. Love the optimization factor there!

List of Options closed in November

 

DCA/Increased Positions

Bought 30 LON:RB @ 65.84 GBP

Reckitt Benckiser touched -10% and as this is the first “top up” I decided to move in again. It’s a staples company very big and with a substantial debt burden on it. But the brands that they have are absolutely top, the company pays a good dividend in the UK (so no double taxation) and it’s one of the core defensive stocks that I own, no reasons not to enter again.

Bought 175 LON:NG @ 8.64 GBP

National Grid is one of the other core stocks in the portfolio. Same points as for LON:RB un here, I wanted to increase staked in NG for many months but prices were too high, thanks to the weakness of the UK and the recent movements of the pound I doubled my position.

Bought 130 LON:UU @ 7.8 GBP

United Utilities is a water related Utility company in the UK. It has been under pressure for not so stellar results, plus monetary policy in the UK is not helping utilities at all. Reading their financial statement I did not see terrible numbers and most importantly the management confirmed the dividend increasing plan for the future as well.

New Positions – Sold Positions

Nothing to report

Options Plays

Nothing to report

Conclusions

World economy is doing well, Europe is on the rise, USA keeps going well too. All seems pretty and beautiful! Nothing to complain about of course!

In November I have not been too active but I could see that Utilities are suffering, together with Consumer Staples, normally these very defensive sectors suffer when the economic recovery is gearing up. House market in Italy and Europe appears also to be on the rise again, after decades of standstill. This could mean that sleeping money is about to be spent again. All indicators that the economic recovery could last long still.

Portfolio-wise I am looking at several European stocks, I need to increase the weight of the European portfolio also to reduce the currency effect that seems to afflict the investments at the moment.