Stock Watching for Fun and Profit: May 2016

Welcome.

It's time to pick some new stocks for our new May 2016 Portfolio. If you are interested in the most current returns and performance of previous years portfolio selections, see the previous two blog posts.

Last minute chgs: see end of blog post for details.

Stock Criteria

This year I wanted to focus on smaller cap stocks that have a dividend yield of around 4%. Here are the stocks I have selected that satisfy the criteria.

Current stock prices are between 10 and 20 dollars per share approx.

Market capitalization is between 1 and 4 billion dollars.

Stock Selections

In keeping with our past theme of 7 stocks and as much diversification as possible, here are the picks.
The initial portfolio value is about $35,000, with each stock purchase worth about $5000. Overall portfolio dividend yield target is above 4%.

AQN div yield: 4.77%, 5 yr return: 96%

CRT.UN div yield: 4.57%, 5 yr return: 47%

ECI div yield: 5.71%, 5 yr return: 114%

ET div yield: 4.24%, 5 yr return: 3%

FCR div yield: 4.11%, 5 yr return: 25%

ITP div yield: 3.42%, 5 yr return: 1165%, yes you read that right.

RNW div yield: 6.87, 5 yr return: 28%

Stock Historical Performance

In April of this year, I started doing my research and modelled this portfolio as if I had bought the stocks in the preceding year. If I had picked these stocks last year, the portfolio would have a return of over 10%, which is much better than the current stock returns of the May 2015 portfolio. The dividends alone on this portfolio amounted to $1500 in one year.

Pictured above is the one year performance graph of the May 2016 portfolio, May 2015 thru May 2016.

May 2016 Portfolio

Ok, so I've reset the portfolio dates to commence on Fri, May 20, 2016, with the stock prices reflecting their end of day values. Commissions are factored in, assuming $10 per trade. Initial portfolio value is approx $35K. Let's see where this one goes, hopefully I can do better with the stock picks than my past two portfolios. Will revisit this and the other portfolios in 3 months time.

Last minute Update

So I was just checking the 5 year returns of the stocks and noticed that Evertz Technologies hasn't done that well at just 3% overall return. Hmm.

I think I will swap it out for NWC instead. It's got a 5 yr return of 45% and it's div yield matches our critera of 4.26%.

So the new portfolio looks like this: