This is a great year for US stocks both S&P500 and Dow Jones did incredible this year. S&P500 return 19.45% and Dow has a return of 25%. My portfolio did 21.2% this year I started with 316,000 and I ended the year with 383,200. (The sudden spike in the graph is due to transferring money, after tranfering is done my balance back to normal)
This year I allocate my portfolio into 4 main sections: ETF, Stocks, Options, Preferred shares.
ETF (26% of my portfolio)
ETF compose about 26% of my portfolio. I have VOO and BRK.B as my ETF. I understand some people may say BRK.B is not an ETF. However since BRK is a holding company of over 88 business and stocks. I treat it as a fund. BRK.B return about 21.6 this year and VOO return about 21% as well(19.4+~2% dividend).
So not much to comment here, just standard market return. Luckily market did well this year, so I just ride with the wave. My goal for ETF allocation should remain 25~30%.
Preferred Stocks (23% of my portfolio)
I treat preferred shares as bonds. They provide fixed income for me.
I currently have HSEA, MERpK, AEH. They compose 23% of my portfolio. These preferred share generate about 6-7% dividend with no 30% dividend tax. So that’s good. If I see a good opportunity in stocks or dip in ETF. I’ll probably continue to reduce my preferred stocks holding. I believe since interest rate remain low, new perferred shares will probably have low yields as well. In that case I think buying stocks is a better choice.
Common Stocks (47% of my portfolio)
Common stocks currrently takes up about 47% of my portfolio. I currently have a diversified portoflio. I have 25 holdings. And I’m pretty happy with that. There are 3 different types of stocks in my stock portfolio and they are cycnical stocks, tech stocks, and dividend growth stocks.
Cycnical stocks I currently have DAL, GM, and FCAU. I’ll continue to see how these perform. They are still currently under value. So I don’t have plans to do anything yet. So we’ll see.
My tech stocks I have FB, NVDA, GOOG, and AMZN. I bought them with 5000$ each and I’ll probably keep holding them. Even though I don’t know how to evaluate them. I think they are all over price. But these business have strong moat and monoplies. So I think they will continue to do fine.
DGI is my bread and butter. I hold a lot of DGI stocks(CVS, CVX, XOM, T, VLO, MO, PM, DIS and etc). I plan on increase number of holdings. I did sell KO this year because of the high PE ratio. I just enjoy the the raising dividiend every year. So effortless.
I can’t calculate a total return for my common stock performance. Since I sold some and I bought some recently. I estimate about ~27-30% return, Since my common stock need to cover my lower performace from preferred shares.
Options (4% of my portfolio)
I started doing options this year and had some great results. My plan was to use only 10,000$ to play options. I buy LEAP calls(2 years call) on QCOM and TGT this year and with profit of 30%. I also bought warrants on BAC and GM. Warrants are similar to LEAP calls. They have brought return 30% as well. Recently I bought calls on GE, so far I’m losing about -30$, but it’s okay. It’s a small amount of my portfolio and I understand the risk.
2018 Goals
- Overall 10% return, so 384,000*1.1 = 422,000
- 1000$ increase in Dividends: 2017 Total Dividend is 9,200$USD, I wish 2018 would be 10,200USD