Robbie Thomas
Investing into 2020
Note: this following blog posting is about investing in the stock market and ETFs. If you plan on investing in what I say here, it’s at your own risk.
One of the items I will be talking about in this great blog here is investing in the stock market. I started investing on 28th November 2017. That was the 10-year anniversary when I had a lovely experience of having a gun pointed at my head and the six-year anniversary of losing my fellow writer friend Justin Dwayne Foxworth. I started with Stash Capital and been on there since this blog posting. I begin investing in ETF’s at first due to the fact that Stash didn’t have much to offer in individual stocks. I started with investing in technology mainly and later got into bonds.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2019 when I took a chance on individual stocks. After reading quite a lot about AT&T and stash later had it available. AT&T at this time of this blog posting pays a $0.52 dividend per share. From August until now, each month, I buy 1-2 shares of AT&T.
The year 2020 has started out pretty well for my portfolio. Another item worthy of mention is marijuana. Once the MJ fund became available on Stash, I bought a few shares at around $30. It got a bit hairy In late September when the marijuana sector along with Aurora cannabis went down big time. Since the time of this blog posting, the MJ fund went from around $16 to $18.50 as of 16 January 2020. I’m looking into the Cronos Group as a possible buy due to the fact that the cost per share is still under ten bucks. But I like to do some research on them first and look at their quarterly reports. For help with my future decisions is taking a look at this chart here. Also, Departures Capital is also helpful as a good chunk of the videos talks about the MJ business.
A mutual fund I’ve got a few dollars with is VGT or Vanguard Information Technology Fund (referred to American Innovators in Stash). When I started investing with Stash, American Innovators was one of the mutual funds I selected. I would put $5-10 a month on 1st in late 2017 to the end of 2018. It wasn’t until early 2018 is when I would put $20-40 in it at a time. Another lowly fund I was investing in was CIBR (referred to Data Defenders in Stash). From November 2017 to early 2020, the fund went up 19% with 321 invested and paid $383, a $62 profit. I sold it and threw some of it into VGT. The CIBR fund had a very low dividend rate and the expense rate was nearly three times higher than the dividend rate. And speaking of funds similar to Data Defenders, I also invested in ROBO (Robots Rising) and SKYY (Cloud Nine), both are similar to Data Defenders with the low dividend payout, but SKYY has a bigger dividend payout. I’m going to keep these two around and my plan is to put more into ROBO until I see a go past 10%.
As of writing this article on 16th January 2020, I see that some of my stocks and funds are at 15% or higher and my portfolio is at 9%. My plan is to invest more with AT&T, Cisco, Wendy’s and I’m looking at add more to the VCIT (Big Business Bonds: Medium-Sized on Stash). VCIT and a couple of other bonds pay each month. Plus also, I want to do some defensive investing for this year.
On 24th December 2018, the stock market took a serious crap. My portfolio went to negative 10% so, this good streak with the stock market while it’s going, can go down. I’m expecting that soon.