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December 2015 trading, investing, and dividends results

December is over and it is time to review how my trading and dividend investing performed during this month and throughout the year 2015.

I will be posting a few posts about my trading and investing these days. Today, I am posting about the December’s trading and investing results. In my next posts I will be posting my whole year trading and investing results, plans, and goals for 2016. I will post them in separate posts to make it clearer to review for all my readers and followers.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for following our blog, reading, and commenting. Also, I would like to thank to all the followers who were interested in following my options trading and subscribed to my Facebook Group where I am posting my options trades against $SPX.

The trades I post in the group should show to everybody my struggle learning profitable trading creating a sustainable income. I also wish to create a legacy so the followers will benefit from my trading and they will be able to use those trades themselves, learn, and create an income themselves.


 


 
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If I will be able to reach this goal, I will be happy. So far, I am in the process of creating my own sustainable income from trading.

 

 · December 2015 trading results

In November I became profitable again trading options, but I had a few trades which I tried to save and rolled them into December. It once again showed up as a wrong move. Instead of closing the trade for a few hundred dollars loss, I rolled the trade and created an even bigger loss. I was then forced to close and take a few thousand dollars loss.

This was the biggest lesson I have learned this year that salvaging a trade is a bad idea. It worked with a few trades, but then it stopped working with one trade which destroyed the rest of my effort.

My December 2015 trading ended up with a big loss instead and literally, I am again at the beginning of my trading race. If you follow this blog, you may remember that in 2012 I started trading with $2,000 dollars, overtime I increased my account into $24,000 dollars but later in 2014 and whole year 2016 I erased it all. I am back at the starting point.

I know, it can be discouraging to many people and they cannot stomach these big swings of going from $2k to $24k and back to $2k. Many people will never do that and will never trade. Many may use my results as an evidence that options trading doesn’t work.

Well, it does work if you do it right. Also, I use only a portion of my money as a play money, I still save money in few different accounts. I have a trading account where I used dividend investing and options trading but later I decided to eliminate dividend investing in that account and now use it for options trading only.

I also have 401k account which I invest into dividend paying mutual funds and use employer contributions advantage. I have a ROTH IRA account which I use for dividend growth investing only (at some point I started trading options in there but stopped for now until I learn to be consistent in making money). I also have an account with Scottrade and Motif Investing.

I started Motif investing account because I wanted to take advantage of fractional investing. I love the idea of creating a portfolio of stocks I wanted to own by creating a motif and then investing in those motifs the exact same way as if you invest into a mutual fund. Start investing with Motif and Get Upto $150 bonus. You can also buy my dividend stocks motif

So my trading account is a very small portion of all my money and although in my trading account I lost 78% of my money, it is only about 3% of all my money I have in other accounts.


 


 
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If you are interested in seeing and following those trades, I created a Facebook closed group in lieu of my newsletters where you can join and see the trades in real time when I post them at the time of opening. It is easier to manage and follow all the trades than via a newsletter and I hope that it will be beneficial for all members of the group who might be interested in trading options and generate an additional income.

To me, at first, I may generate an income of $120 to $360 per month, but as my account will be growing bigger, this amount will grow too.

All trades are spreads against SPX with minimum money to trade as low as $500. If that is something you may be interested in, I recommend you joining the group.

However, if you decided to trade options against SPX, be ready for some hard work, frustration, and tears. Be prepared for your account net-liq fluctuating up and down almost to a break point. Trading is not easy, get rich quick scheme. We will have to work it up slowly, step by step before we become confident, consistent traders.
 

Here is my trading result for the month:

 

December 2015 options trading income: -$2,833.00 (-24.20%)
2015 portfolio Net-Liq: $2,539.72 (-37.47%)
2015 portfolio Cash Value: $2,639.72 (-58.96%)
2015 overall trading account result: -78.53%

 

Here are the results of my options trading:

Options Income
(Click to enlarge)

 
Here are the results of my new options strategy:

Options Income
(Click to enlarge)

 
Here is the entire account value from the beginning of tracking it up to today:

TD Account Value
 

No matter how discouraging this may look I am positive and look forward to 2016 as I hope and believe that I will be able to trade with positive results again and create the desired sustainable and consistent income.

 

 


 
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 · December 2015 dividend investing results

Of course, my dividend investing was great and I am pleased with results. I like to see my investments slowly growing as I use DRIP for reinvesting my dividends and buying more shares of the stocks I own.

Even though I had a few shares which suffered and were beaten down by the market for various reasons (some for dividend cuts) I still love the companies and I decided to stay the course. One company which cut dividends significantly (by 75%) was Kinder Morgan (KMI). The stock lost 60% of its value. Some investors decided to sell the stock and took 50% – 60% loss on their holdings I decided to stay, keep the stock, and actually plan on investing more in KMI. It may no longer be a dividend growth investment for me, but I look at it as a capital growth stock for now. If I get some dividends while waiting for recovery, I am fine with it.

And waiting for recovery? What if it takes years? What if it takes next 20 years to recover? Well, why not? I have 20 – 25 years to wait. I do not have to sell it now and take 60% loss! I can wait it out. And what if five years from now the stock goes back up to $25 a share, or $30 a share? Reinvesting dividends and investing more into this company can help me to recover faster. Is it good money being thrown against bad money? As of now, I do not consider it to be. It may change if the company starts losing money, losing their infrastructure of an energy transportation company. Nothing is the case here.

I have a few more companies like that, mostly companies involved in oil. I still take it as an oil recovery play. At some point in the future this oil glut will become a non-issue again and investments I am making today when everybody is running away will pay off. I only have one concern about my MLPs (LGCY and VNR) and that is whether they survive this threat or not. I believe they will but if not, then that will be a loss. But I am willing to take this risk and continue investing into those stocks.

 
 
 

Dividend stocks added or removed from portfolio:

 

December 2015 dividend stock buys: 27 shares
Archer-Daniels-Midland Company (ADM)
@ $37.09
December 2015 dividend stock sells: none

 

I had a dilemma this month which stock to add to my portfolio. I was about to invest some of the proceedings from my bonus and I was thinking to continue investing into oil involved companies and add Chevron (CVX), but I also wanted to know what my readers think, so in my last post I added a poll asking you what stock would you invest in if it was you and you could choose only one dividend growth stocks. The winner was ADM. So I decided to take another look at the stock and compare it with CVX. What I liked the most was the dividend growth of ADM.

Here is what I saw:

  ADM CVX
Div. history 41 years 20 years
Div. yield now 3.10% 4.80%
Div. yield in 10 yrs 14.49% 5.66%
Avg. div. growth 13.52% 8.62%

 

What a few more percent of growth can do in ten years! This made me to change my opinion as I wanted that growth! So I decided to buy ADM instead. I will of course purchase CVX next time as I have a few stocks which I like to invest in, but one step a time!

Byt the way, this is why I like Motif Investing as in that account I could already buy it as a fractional investment while in my ROTH IRA I have to wait to save enough money before I invest.
 
 

 

 
 

snowball

I also continued reinvesting my dividends using DRIP program. I love how my holdings grow when reinvesting the dividends and when the stock prices are going lower. As I believe we are heading into a recession I will be able buying more shares for a lot cheaper. For example I own American Capital Agency Corp. (AGNC) and as the stock was sliding down I was able to buy 1.451 shares, the following month it was 1.592 shares, the next month 1.648 shares, etc. The more shares I buy the more dividends I receive and the more shares I can buy. It is like a snowball rolling down the hill and becoming bigger and bigger.

 

Dividend stocks DRIP:

 

December 2015 DRIP: ConocoPhillips (COP)
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
American Capital Agency Corp. (AGNC)
Realty Income Corporation (O)
Vanguard Natural Resources, LLC (VNR)
Prospect Capital Corporation (PSEC)

 

Here are my ROTH IRA trading/investing results:

 

December 2015 dividend income: $71.28
December 2015 options income: $0.00
2015 portfolio value: $15,139.89 (1.57%)
2015 overall dividend account result: -13.24%

 

Here my dividend income:

ROTH IRA account value
 

Here is the entire account value from the beginning of tracking it up to today:

ROTH IRA account value

 

 


 
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Below is my dividend income review for the entire year:

Dividend Income
My ROTH IRA dividend income breakdown per month and per company.
 
 

 · 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.

My accounts dropped from previous month and are losing -3.71% (down from previous month) for the year. This year will be a losing year for my investments.

Remember, if you like trading options and want to have trade ideas for free, join my Facebook closed group and follow my SPX trades in real time, comment, ask questions, and interact with other members.

 
 

You can join the options trading group here

 
 

What do you think?

How about your investing or trading results?
 
 





2 responses to “December 2015 trading, investing, and dividends results”

  1. DivHut says:

    I’m still not 100% clear at what I’m looking at when I see your images of your options trades. All I know is that I’m still not comfortable trading them. Though I hold no energy names I do agree with your assessment that energy is simply an “oil recovery play,” and that in a year or two or five oil will probably bounce back and with it lift all energy related companies. I have read a lot of KMI sells among our DGI community. I think many feel let down by the cut. At least I like your ADM buy. I have added to my ADM in Nov. and Dec. and it’s still on my January considerations list. Thanks for sharing your recent update.

    • Martin says:

      Hi Keith,
      Thanks for stopping by and dropping a line. When looking at my trading records of options, you are actually looking at a disaster as of now as I lost money this year by wrong trading. Mostly by trying to save trades which actually didn’t need saving in the first place and instead of closing them for a small loss I turned them into a big loss. Here is the trading record https://hellosuckers.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2015-12-strategyResults.png showing the results of the second half of the year. Well, nothing I would be happy about nor proud to present, but since I strive to be open I post losses too. I had 23 winning trades and only 7 losing trades. Unfortunately those losing trades were big enough to wipe out my winning trades and more.

      But, I am still positive and determined to trade more carefully next year, stop salvaging bad trades and turning them into disasters and improve my trade record. It is perfectly fine if you do not feel comfortable trading options then do not trade them. It is a good money making vehicle but it must be done correctly otherwise you lose money (you can see my example). What I am doing is advanced options trading, If you ever want to trade options I recommend you start selling puts against companies you want to own because the worst outcome what can happen to you is that you would be forced to buy that stock. For example, if you want to buy ADM, it sells at i.e. $37 a share, then start selling 36 strike puts against ADM (but make sure you have $3,600 cash available for an assignment should it ever happen). Then the put either expires and you keep the premium or the stock drops below $36 and you keep the premium and buy the stock at $36 a share.

      Yes, the KMI cut was a blow, but I wasn’t willing to take 60% loss so I decided to hold. ADM is a good stock and I might be accumulating more later this year too.

      Thanks again

      Martin

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