July 2021

A General Overview

EUROPEAN CHAMPIONS! I had to start with that, didn’t I? Italy won the football European Championship, as usual these happenings seem to get the nation “back together” for a week or so, where everyone feels proud of being Italian and all is good and great. Italy has never been a “really united” country, we literally made history (Roman Empire, Renaissance, just to mention a few major points in time), but when it came to be united we are not that great.

But then comes football, and other sporting events, and all the cultural divide that we have between north and south magically disappears and we all start speaking about our country in positive terms, while during the year opinions are not so rosy… Oh well, that’s Italy, baby…

On a more personal note, we managed to sneak out of Florence for few days, went to the mountains to catch some cool weather and have some strolls in the woods. Unfortunately we miscalculated Mrs.Stalflare conditions with the pregnancy (she gets tires very quickly), so we decided to spend the last part of the holiday in Lake Garda, to be a bit more relaxed. All was good, after all they are still holidays!

COVID-wise we are getting into the “Green Pass” mindset, where this “green pass” it’s basically a certification that you’ve been vaccinated and therefore you are allowed to do certain things that non-vaccinated individuals cannot do. Of course this is sparking lots of protests, most of which I believe to be quite wrong. I am not a doctor, nor a virologist or anything similar, so I am not in a position to comment on the scientific issues of the vaccines and so on. On the other side if a government sets a law, as a citizen I might not like it, but eventually I feel that you have to follow it. If you really don’t like, the world is big enough for you to chose a different country to live in, I see no real issue with that.

Having said that, most of these issues are part of the infodemic (which I find more dangerous than COVID) that we are living since 2010, COVID is here to stay, for sure in September I can see the Italian government totally unprepared AGAIN for the school reopening, and with that contagion will pick up again, thanks to the colder weather too..

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%
July 2021	27.39%	1.39%	2.61%	-5.54%

LH Portfolio Milestones + Monthly current year

TR is decreasing (vs. previous month) – 28 BPS, not a lot, but July was very flat marketwise…

YTER is decreasing (vs. previous month) – 1 BPS… every little helps!

Net Yearly YoC is decreasing (vs. previous month) – In reality is flat, but still gets a red colour!

Forex is getting better (vs. previous month) – Also here we are talking peanuts (5BPS).

Dividends and Options

June income was 1146 Euro

Dividends accounted for 1076 Euro (+11% vs 2020) and Options ended up with a 70 Euro score (-90% vs 2020).

Dividends

Not bad at all, July has been a difficult month in the past, lots of dividend date changes, being able to stay above 1K it’s pretty positive.

Options

I can’t find decent trades to engage in, 70 euro might seem little but it’s a great effort considering the market and the absence of serious volatility.

DCA/Increased Positions

Nothing to report

New Positions – Sold Position

Nothing to report

The Financial Conclusions

In July there was an “attempt” at a minor market fall, there was a day where all indexes seemed to go down seriously, as if finally someone stopped this dream that financial assets seem to have been living lately.

It seemed as if someone finally looked at inflation issues, unemployment, poor/rich divide, overly inflated evaluations in some sectors of the market.

If I am correct it all lasted ONE DAY. Then back to the old growing mode, albeit slower than before, that we have witnessed in the last year.

Needless to say, this month I resumed my “not buying anything” stance, that to be honest was already there in June but I was then assigned a PUT option on GOLD and therefore I did buy 100 pieces of a stock… I am not planning to buy anything at these levels, unless some opportunity arises. Might SELL something, but we’ll see about that.

One thing DID happen in a big way for me though. In hindsight I can say that in 1 month I managed to make a 26% profit on my portfolio. All in one month!

How comes that it doesn’t show in the numbers here above? Well, the reason is because I did not actually managed to make a profit, I managed to dodge a MAJOR BULLET that the Italian IRS (or AdE as we call it here) sent me at the beginning of the year.

What happened in January is that I’ve received a letter from out IRS, stating that to their records I had transactions not reported in my tax returns for a value that was 80% of my portfolio. Of course the amount is so big that I thought it was a mistake, but as there is an accountant that does all the calculations for my trading activity, I let him speak to the administration.

After many months he came back to me saying that he was asked to produce a document to explain the nature of this amount that the broker sent to the IRS, and said document of course was not going to be free.

I then contacted one of my uncles, who used to work for the IRS, asking for some help on how to manage this situation, as it’s the first time that I get entangled in something like that. He advised that I’d write directly to the IRS, explaining “not so much in detail” that what they were asking was a gross mistake.

Fortunately after several mails, documents, numbers, calculation and so on I managed to prove my point and the case got closed as a “false positive” (so they said, after all admitting a mistake it’s not in their prerogatives I guess…).

Point is: keep all your numbers and accounts at all times, you never know if you’ll need them…