June 2021

A General Overview

June has been a rather uninteresting month, so to speak. Set aside from the Euro 2021 competition if felt like I’ve done nothing worth writing about, but of course it’s not true.

First things first, I’ve managed to pull out another injury to my right knee, which already suffered two surgeries. Initially this incident got me really downhearted, sports have been my “sanity lifeline” in this past year an d half, and more importantly in recent months since “we” are pregnant again (baby due at the end of September).

Fortunately major damages have been avoided (after an MRI), and I will have to do some injections + physiotherapy, not sure if this will mean a potential come back to playing football, but we’ll see later.

Work-wise I’ve managed to land an handful of classes in a new school. This is great news, because with barely 300 euros invoiced in the last year our financial situation is coming to a stressing point. You could say that I’ve got plenty of money in my investment account, but the scope of this investment is to have a backup “pension” for when I retire, so technically I should not use it before then. If I can avoid tapping into the LH Fund it’s better, hence, finding a new job was a key point.

Fact is, I am pretty much on “trial”. So we need to see how these lectures go and hopefully if all goes well I might get confirmed, and get some courses to teach this Fall too…

We were meant to start some renovations in our home, but right now all is suspended, the reason is twofold. First, as usual the “professionals” that are helping doing all the projects are being overly slow. Secondly, there is scarcity of workers and materials because of the “miniboom” that the post covid created. Apparently lots of people turned to renovations for their homes, to use government bonuses that were made to boost the economy.

That’s all really, COVID numbers are getting better and better, summer is starting, I still feel as if we are living in that “covid bubble” that lockdowns and government intervention created, but I can feel that something is changing, so hopefully we’ll be out of it soon…

LH FUND

Explanation of terminology and graphs is HERE.

Let’s see the numbers:

Month	TR	YTER	NYYoC	Forex
31 Dec 2014	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%
31 Dec 2015	-3.33%	1.22%	-0.13%	-1.00%
31 Dec 2016	7.06%	1.14%	1.16%	-4.35%
31 Dec 2017	9.94%	1.04%	2.64%	-5.94%
31 Dec 2018	3.28%	1.24%	2.70%	-3.53%
31 Dec 2019	23.50%	1.35%	2.72%	-1.40%
31 Dec 2020	15.76%	1.28%	2.70%	-7.60%
Jan 2021	15.52%	1.27%	2.71%	-7.03%
Feb 2021	17.42%	1.26%	2.71%	-6.69%
Mar 2021	25.19%	1.24%	2.67%	-4.85%
Apr 2021	24.93%	1.23%	2.69%	-6.98%
May 2021	28.02%	1.24%	2.76%	-8.12%
June 2021	27.67%	1.40%	2.61%	-5.59%

LH Portfolio Milestones + Monthly current year

TR is decreasing (vs. previous month) – Taxes were paid, loss of 40bps is quite low all things considered

YTER is increasing (vs. previous month) – Ah here you can see it better, 24bps increase in YTER. Bad news, but so far I did not find a legal way to avoid paying taxes…

Net Yearly YoC is decreasing (vs. previous month) – Back under 1.70%, it seems that I can never break this metric, I am aiming at 3% but keep bouncing back every tax season…

Forex is getting better (vs. previous month) – While GBP is fairly stable these days, the Dollar managed to claw some growth back against the Euro.

Dividends and Options

June income was 1545 Euro

Dividends accounted for 1315 Euro (-38% vs 2020) and Options ended up with a 230 Euro score (-76% vs 2020).

Dividends

Following the May “bonanza” of dividends passing the 3K milestone, it was time to come back to earth. As I mentioned previously, I might change reporting, switching to a quarterly system from next year. In reality the result of May and this one of June was affected by many companies moving pay date from a month to another, but still “on aggregate” May/June was still better this year compared to 2020, so it’s all good!

Options

I am trading for peanuts these days. Premiums are so low, and strikes are so high… I use options to gain potential exposure to stock at interesting prices, these days I cannot find many, almost none. I still managed to do 200 euros, which was my original target, but July and August don’t look good at all under these market conditions…

DCA/Increased Positions

Nothing to report

New Positions – Sold Position

Bought 100 GOLD @ 23 USD

Got Barrick Gold because of an option that expired ITM and that I let them assign me. The rationale towards investing in this miner is just the fact that I gain some exposure to gold, the price of the stock of course it’s correlated to the price of the commodity, and it pays a little dividend. Mind you, correlated doesn’t mean that it follows strictly what the commodity is doing, but it’s good enough for me to keep this position open until it gets closer to the average price, when I will start selling covered call NTM.

The Financial Conclusions

Nothing much to say, markets suffered a small downturn which was gained back in no time. After that they continued a very slow, but steady, path towards higher valuations. I hear 2023 will mark the end of QE, and a potential increase of interest rates, governments are talking about austerity measures (but not right now)… So the future doesn’t look all that bright at all.

If COVID did something, it’s surely the fact that it increased the differences that we see in our society. The poor/rich divide is still there, I am talking more about the state work/employee vs. self employed. Depending on the county in which you live, having a state job or working for big corporations basically meant almost 2 years of paid holidays, for the rest of the people who rely on their job to make a living things have not gone exactly like that.

Funny thing is that we calculate unemployment based on the first two categories, while the self employed “make the news” only if they close their activity. In a place like Italy, this divide it’s even bigger, mostly due to the fact that the government is already pretty poor and could not help workers in a good way.

I think that this aspect is quite scary on one side and maybe a little bit underestimated on the other side.

The other piece of news that we’ve had here is that the government lifted the ban on firing people. It did it almost for all the sectors of the economy, sparing textile/fashion which will see laying off resuming in November.

Of course this story had to stop sooner or later, as the economy goes back to normality, of course being used to subsidies, free money, endlessly growing stock market this move was not received well (despite the fact that the government did announce it more than 6 months ago).

I believe that among the the biggest damages that this crisis brought, one of them is the cultural aspect towards the economy, risk taking and debts. Too many people are walking paths that I believe they barely understand, potentially this can be disastrous if financial markets take a serious downturn.

And that brings me to the usual “closure” of my pieces here on the blog. I do not trust this environment. It’s too easy, too simple, looks like everyone is a winner, but we know that it cannot be like that for long…