It's all about the dividends in June. The market stayed depressed and I only made one sale, but collected significant dividends to the point that the turnover yield is artificially inflated to over 30%. But this is tempered by an good yield on available funds of 1.55% (a respectable 18% when annualized) and the good new is totally overwhelmed by the large unrealized losses.
But I maintain my hold and collect strategy and am looking forward to two maturing CDs. I plan to use these to buy in further if the market remains depressed.
My only sale was:
- Telecomunicacoes de Sao Paulo - Only half of my holdings, kinda wishing I sold 100%.
My current holdings and unrealized gains/losses are as follows:
- Exxon Mobil - Down 14.7%
- Exelon Corp - Down 15.7%
- FirstEnergy Corp - Down 6.9%
- Telecomunicacoes de Sao Paulo - Up 3.6%
- Telecommunications Systems - Down 31.5%
- National Grid PLC - Down 17.4%
- Total SA - Down 6.2%
- Sempra Energy - Down 0.6%
- Harsco Corp - Down 8.7%
- Nokia - Down 13.4%
Dividends were collected on the following:
- FirstEnergy Corp
- Exxon Mobil
- Exelon Corp
- Total SA
- National Grid PLC - Not a dividend, but a Rights sale in excess of 10% of the purchase price of the stock. This certainly helps offset some unrealized losses.
I was quite pleased that that one of my recent comments on Bargaineering.com was the impetus for a post. It was a real revelation to me that Jim would say "everyone implies that your CD ladder is held at a single institution." I've always thought quite that opposite that no one holds their CD ladder at a single institution, especially in the electronic age.
Regardless of the assumption, my personal need to track my CD ladder across multiple banks has led me to develop a tool for keeping up with this. I use it for tracking maturities, yields, beneficiaries and potential exceptions to FDIC insurance limitations (I wish this was a bigger problem for me!).
Given this, I maintain a tracking spreadsheet in google docs. In addition to tracking the particulars of each CD, it also provides a visual representation of the CD ladder that makes the concept a bit easier to follow.
This tool has evolved over the years, It originated as a Lotus123 spreadsheet and later evolved to Excel and eventually google docs. It also grew from simply tracking my CD ladder to covering each of the components of my overall financial strategy.
I use google docs to maintain this spreadsheet and my stock trading spreadsheet. These have become two foundational components of my financial monitoring. Needless to say, since these are on a public server, I don't keep any specific information like account numbers or login info in these docs.
