Alright,
DIVIDENDS!
I received $456.69 in dividends in May.
Every quarter there are 3 months or dividend payouts, this is the middle one.
My total dividend haul this year is now $2165.
The thing I enjoy the most about a dividend payment is its permanent, no do-overs. It’s money in the pocket that I can spend however I see fit. It’s my little piece of the pie and it is delicious!
Market Musings
The Dow Jones is close to 18000 and the TSX is 14000. I don’t see any reason for the market to be this optimistic with earning doing so poorly. It looks to me like the rally in oil is a large factor behind this and I’m not sure how much more steam this thing has. I continue to look for safety on every level. I still hold several highly speculative investments that I will continue to look to exit as I head toward safety in long term Government bonds, aristocrat stocks, or cash. I will try not to hold on to too much cash as it doesn’t do anything except lose its value over time.
I do believe gold might be a good bet but I HATE buying commodities do to the speculative nature that is inherent with them. (Disclosure) I do own a small amount of physical silver though I treat it more as a toy then an investment.
Oil, what about oil? Oil is getting very close to the $50 mark for WTI. I think it will power on up after people take their profits around $50. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it approach $60 and stay in the 50-60 dollar range for a very long time.
Oil for me is a love hate relationship. I own a fair amount of oil companies that I have been slowly picking up since around Jan 2015. I started buying when WTI was trading at $60 thinking it shouldn’t go too much lower as the breakeven price was around this level. Well I was very wrong. I’m still holding all of these stocks I bought and will be looking to exit many of them now that I have (luckily) recouped most of the loses during the downturn. One thing I did right in hindsight was to make sure the company I was buying could weather a bad market for a long time.
I will look back at this “collapse” as a learning opportunity and remember “don’t try to catch a falling knife”
Moves in May
I sold 0 Shares in anything this month.
I bought 1130 shares of Plaza REIT for $4.85 per share bringing my total share to 2470. You can read the April report on why here.
I bought 75 shares of Franklin Resources for $36.02 a share. This is a new position for me. This company has a great balance sheet and has increased its dividend payment every year for over 25 years. Franklin dividend history. This is one of those companies I just plan to forget about. Safe, oversold and an ever-increasing payout.
I plan to add more shares to Franklin if it continues to get cheaper. I also plan to buy some more Canadian bonds in the form of an ETF.