September 2022

A General Overview

Well, things seem to be getting back to normality, after the hectic summer we lived with 2 kids at home. Elder is back in school and the young one is about to start kindergarten A sign of the changes is the fact that I’ve managed to go back to international business trips, albeit university related, meaning that the better half of me had to deal with the 2 aforementioned kids all by herself for a week.

I cannot hide the fact that it was a refreshing event for me, not having to worry constantly about kids related stuff was a rather welcome change.

Apart from that life goes on, international developments don’t look fantastic unfortunately (with the was in Ukraine and all), and we changed yet another government in Italy, this time a right wing party won the elections.

Nothing much to add to be honest, coming months are going to be dedicated at cleaning the house and resetting the mess that we’ve been living in lately, so, if all goes well, we’ll be able to see some tangible changes pretty soon. I’ll keep my finger crossed…

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%
31 Dec 2021	37.13%	1.35%	2.69%	-2.05%
Jan 2022	35.83%	1.34%	2.61%	-2.75%
Feb 2022	35.70%	1.33%	2.63%	0.45%
Mar 2022	40.68%	1.32%	2.64%	0.19%
Apr 2022	41.87%	1.31%	2.65%	4.09%
May 2022	41.54%	1.32%	2.72%	2.06%
Jun 2022	34.62%	1.47%	2.63%	3.47%
Jul 2022	39.94%	1.46%	2.63%	6.32%
Aug 2022	41.24%	1.45%	2.66%	8.19%
Sep 2022	31.26%	1.44%	2.70%	7.53%

LH Portfolio Milestones + Monthly current year

TR is decreasing (vs. previous month) – 1000bps, markets have been on the bear side this month!

YTER is decreasing (vs. previous month) – 1bps, every little counts!

Net Yearly YoC is stable (vs. previous month) – 4bps, it’a GREAT result, let’s hope I can keep this streak.

Forex is worse (vs. previous month) – Still positive, but a little less positive.

Dividends and Options

Income this month was 2473 Euro

Dividends accounted for 2148 Euro (+13% vs 2021) and Options ended up with a 325 Euro score (-55% vs 2021).

Dividends

Another double digit increase, this is certainly a great year for dividends.

Options

Not bad at all, well above the 200 euro target that I’ve set for myself.

DCA/Increased Positions

Nothing to report

New Positions – Sold Position

Bought 100 NRUC @ 22.99

NRUC is a preferred ETD stock, I have been following this company for quite some time, and in reality it’s a Consortium that provides energy to rural customers in the USA. It’s a superboring business, doesn’t make the headlines at all, but I like the business model and the fact that it looks pretty stable/predictable.

Bought 100 INTC @ 27.44

What can I say on INTC that hasn’t been said already? I suspect that it has some way down to do yet, but I wanted to make a first entrance on this company. I miss technology stocks in the Portfolio, I believe that they can spin things around (in a bit), their investments will likely pay off in several years so the market now it’s punishing them. Maybe a little too much.. But I am not planning to sell INTC anytime soon.

Financial Conclusions

September was a rather bad month for the markets. Inflation data was not good, FED rising interest rates and not providing guidance leaves the market quite jittery and we saw right at the end of the month a quite strong selloff.

To me this is quite normal, and that’s why I am not worried particularly (of course nobody likes to see red numbers all over the place, but that’s the way things are. Fundamentals in the economy seem pretty weak still, geopolitical tensions do not seem to subside and recession hasn’t “technically” hit yet. If I had to make an half-assed prediction I would say that the market has space to go down, below pre-covid highs at least.

The rally that we saw during and after covid was based on nothing, and sooner or later things will have to come back to the ground. I really do not see any other option.

How far and when is not for me to say, but my belief is that the bottom is not in yet. There are some opportunities out there, some stocks are really battered and already below covid minimums, right now I am focusing on those as I believe that the space “down” is limited.

In operative terms I am prepared to move only on very high quality stocks and also my options work is going to see an increase in the safety margins that I normally trade.

Europe remains pretty depressed, divided and soon also a bit more cold than before. There are certainly some challenges but also some opportunities, but the level of uncertainty is certainly higher than the USA.

UK deserves a mention on itself, after shooting themselves in the foot with Brexit it seems that they haven’t got anything right since the referendum. The mess with the mini-budget it’s something that will stay in history books for long, I feel that they are going to suffer the most out of this situation both in terms of inflation, energy and social tensions. Investment wise I am waiting to see what happens there too, there might be some great opportunities in the coming months. It’s a crying shame to see the UK doing what they did, it’s not the country where I spent 5 years of my young life anymore.

But such is life, things change and with them we need to adjust…

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