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April 2015 trading, investing and dividends results

April 2015 is over and I am going back to reporting my results. I wasn’t much consistent in reporting in the past as many times I either didn’t have time or was lazy to write a report. I am still looking for the best way to report my results but keep it simple since at one point in the past I overdo it. I made reporting, analyzing, and recording so complicated that I myself lost interest in doing it. So keep it simple.

The readers, investors and traders following this blog know that I participate in the market in two ways: trading options and dividend investing.

April 2015 trading results

I trade options, mostly spreads (bull put and bear call spreads, sometimes debit spreads, and naked puts) against publicly traded companies and SPX index (S&P500). You can follow my trades at My Trades & Income page where I list all open and closed trades.

In April I made no money but I also lost no money. Many of my trades are open and a few trades I had to be closed in April I had to move them away in time as they went against me. And I still fight with those trades:
 

April 2015 options trading result: $0.00 (0.00%)
2015 portfolio value: $12,336.99
2015 overall trading account result: +5.39%

 

April 2015 dividend investing results

I use the dividend growth strategy at my ROTH IRA account. I am not as aggressive contributing and investing in my ROTH IRA account as I wish to be. My income doesn’t allow me to contribute more. So I slowly accumulate all received dividends plus my small contributions, invest them into a commission free ETF (I like to use RWX which pays dividends and so far I was able to make some money with this ETF). Once I save at least $1,000 in this ETF, I sell the fund and buy a stock. Then rinse and repeat.

Using the above accumulation strategy I was able to accumulate enough to buy a new stock into my portfolio:

 

April 2015 dividend stock buys: ConocoPhillips (COP)
April 2015 dividend stock sells: none

 

Last year I was working on a screener which would help me to find a stock I should buy when deciding which stock to add to my portfolio. I am a mechanical engineer and because of that I like to keep my trading math based and mechanical. As mechanical as possible, so I can eliminate my emotions.

I created a screener which calculates the most undervalued stocks to buy. It is based on P/E, forward P/E, current earnings, future earnings and some other metrics. It browses my watch list of dividend stocks (approx. 200 stocks) and assigns a rank to each stock. A stock with the highest rank is the most undervalued and that is the stock I want to buy.


Get up to $150 when you start trading with Motif

I publish those stock picks every month in my “Undervalued Stocks” section and if you bought my picks for April 2015, you would be up 7.32% for the month.

You can also open an account with Motif Investing (and get $150 bonus) and by my Undervalued stocks motif (or portfolio). With Motif Investing you can buy all 30 undervalued stocks. Each month the portfolio is rebalanced where I remove stocks which are no longer undervalued and add new undervalued stocks. In the meantime, you can collect the dividends.

If you do not want to be selling, you can just add stocks which are on the list and start from the top.

 

April 2015 dividend income: $79.07
2015 portfolio value: $18,478.22
2015 overall dividend account result: +5.89%

 

All accounts

Besides trading and dividend accounts I also have 401k account, emergency savings account, etc, which I do not report in detail. You can review those accounts in my “all Accounts Value table at the bottom of My Trades & Income page.

From that table you can see that all my accounts are up 9.86% for the year. Considering how bad the market was this month I think, this is not a bad result.

What do you think?

How about your investing or trading result?

 





4 responses to “April 2015 trading, investing and dividends results”

  1. DivHut says:

    Congrats on the April dividend income. It’s all about taking steps in the right direction which is what you are doing and over time your passive income will really grow into something special. Interesting buy with COP for the month as not many of the dividend bloggers are really buying into the oil sector these days. Thanks for sharing your recent update.

    • Martin says:

      DH, thank you. Trying to get better. The good thing is that my portfolio is still growing slowly up. That’s positive.
      Thanks for stopping by.

  2. Martin,

    Excellent level of dividend income already considering you’re still in the early phases of building your portfolio. Can’t wait to see where you land in a couple of years.

    Keep it up!
    NMW

    • Martin says:

      Yeap, I started late and my family budget is keeping me back making saving difficult, but trying to get ahead of myself and save everything I can as well as buying higher yield stocks to move forward faster (plus options trading of course to increase my income).
      Thanks for stopping by

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