New 2017 Portfolio - March 1

As promised in my previous post, today I will give you the details about this new model portfolio I have setup for 2017.  Normally I create my portfolios around the May timeframe but with all the uncertainty around Donald Trump's presidency, I decided to create this new one around the time of his inauguration. So I created this portfolio during the first days of February 2017.

I have also strayed from my approach of portfolio sector diversification in this portfolio, so I would not recommend that you seriously consider using this Food and Grocery centric portfolio as something to invest in.  We are purely looking at this from an academic standpoint.

Ok so here is the Feb 2017 portfolio, F2017 for future reference.  It consists of seven stocks as always, because I think seven is a nice manageable number of stocks in a portfolio. The stocks in this portfolio are all grocery or food companies.

It has been a month since I created this portfolio and is now returning about 2.5%.


The stocks in this portfolio are:  AW.UN (A&W Revenue), MRU (Metro), PZA (Pizza Pizza Royalty), SAP (Saputo), BPF.UN (Boston Pizza Royalties), MTY (MTY Food Group) and L (Loblaws).

The above Google Finance chart shows the stocks data such as Market Cap, EPS, P/E ratio and Beta.  We have a mix of smaller companies and larger ones in this portfolio.  The smaller ones are income trusts, much like mutual funds, but can be bought and sold on the TSX.

For our model portfolio, I bought 100 shares of each company.   Below is more data about each stock with a corresponding 1 year return graph.  Again, you can find all of this information on Google Finance by searching for the stock name.

AW.UN has had an excellent year to date and a 42% return. It has a dividend yield of 4%.

MRU is down 10% over 1 year and a dividend yield of 1.67%.  

PZA is up 39% in the past year and has a dividend yield of 4.83%.

SAP one year return is 16% with a dividend yield of 1.31%.

BPF.UN had a return of over 23% in the past year and it's dividend yield is a whopping 6%.

MTY had an amazing one year return of 70% with a small dividend yield of .87%.

L is at about the same price as it was last year, so no gains and the dividend yield is 1.5%.

Clearly, we have a mix of winners and losers in this group of stocks.

If we examine the first chart again, we see that MTY is stand out stock of the portfolio after one month.  L and AW.UN are tracking at the portfolio average and the remainder of the stocks are just average.

The F2017 model portfolio has already given some dividends and that is reflected in the graph above. The blue line is the performance of this portfolio and the red line is the performance of the TSX during the same one month.   It says our return is 3.22% so we have a 0.7% dividend yield at this point in time.  I always like to see that the portfolios I create outperform the TSX, so we are off to a good start.

Full disclosure: I don't have any of these stocks in my own portfolio right now.

We will revisit this and all the other portfolios performance in May 2017.   See you then.

Model Portfolio Review at Feb 24, 2017

Hi and welcome back to my portfolio blog.  It's time to look at how my stock picks are doing.

M2014 Portfolio

We see considerable improvement on the May 2014 portfolio.  If it wasn't for the market downturn this past week, this portfolio's gain would all be in the green.  As it stands, it's not looking too shabby.
EQB had a big jump in it's share price this month.  The only stock that's losing money is LNR, but not by much.  The portfolio is now returning 15% as we approach May 2017, so we can say, for now,  that the average return is about 5% per year more or less.  Biggest winners in our portfolio are GIB.A (tech) with over 67% and GC at 58% return at this review.

Here's the May 2014 portfolio performance graph.  After a dismal 2016, things are starting to look up again.  The total return of the portfolio, inclusive of dividends is over 17%, so that gives us a dividend yield of about 2.5%.  Our performance graph also compares our returns to the TSX over the same period of time and we did a whole lot better than it's 5% return.  The actual return of the TSX therefore was only about 1.7% each year for about three years.  That's pretty close to current GIC rates.   So you definitely don't want to just buy the index or mutual funds that just mirror the TSX composite returns. 

M2015 Portfolio

What can I say about the May 2015 portfolio that I haven't already talked about in past posts.  DH continues to be the loser stock in our holdings.  With the exception of DH and SJ, the remainder of the stocks have held up well, with three of our holdings yielding double digit returns.  I have Telus (T) in my RRSP and this stock hasn't seen any uptick in share price.  Luckily it provides a 4% dividend, so it's worth holding on to it for that.

In fact, if you look at the total returns of the May 2015 portfolio, and include the dividend yield of 5%, it doubles the return at over 10%.  It would be even more if DH wasn't doing so poorly.   Whereas the TSX only returned 3.4% in the last year and a half. 

M2016 Portfolio

My most recent portfolio is as of May 2016.  It hasn't been an entire year yet, and it is up over 8% before dividends.  Already there are three stocks in our seven stock portfolio with double digit gains. The only laggard is FCR right now at just under minus 1%.

With dividends, this portfolio is returning over 10% and is pretty much on par with the TSX return for the same time frame, except that we don't have any exposure to resource or gold stocks.  It's interesting that this portfolio was outperforming the TSX until November 2016, which is the time that Donald Trump got elected as president of the USA.  I guess we will have to see what the portfolio consequences are in the next couple of years.

Summary

Portfolio and total overall returns (inclusive of dividend yield)

May 2014 - 17.89%
May 2015 - 10.16%
May 2016 - 10.57% (for 9 months)

A New Portfolio

Instead of waiting for May 2017, some of you may know that I have already created a new portfolio for 2017.  I decided to throw caution to the wind and instead of diversifying, I created a new portfolio in the first week of February 2017 that holds only food and grocery stocks.  I wouldn't do this in any of my own portfolios, but I was thinking about what Donald Trump's presidency would mean to my actual portfolios.  Right now, the markets are extremely bullish and I think there should be some kind of reversal.

I created the new food portfolio because despite any major catastrophe, people still have to eat, hence the food and grocery portfolio.  So, what I'm saying now is that I'm a bit contrarian to what's happening in the markets.  I have sold off some stocks that have reached new highs in my real portfolios.

Anyways, in the next few days, I will reveal the seven stocks in the Feb 2017 portfolio or F2017 for short.   See you then!

Review of Model Portfolios at January 2017

Happy New Year Everyone.  It's time to open up our portfolios and examine what has happened since we last checked in.   We are tracking stocks in 3 different portfolios which I have set up during the month of May in years 2014, 2015 and 2016.  The screen shots below are taken on January 8, 2017.

Wall street and Bay street have embraced Donald Trump's victory  as the next president of the United States.  Stocks have been in a bull market since the end of October 2016.

May 2014

The good news for the May 2014 portfolio is that most of the stocks have now in positive territory.
The overall return for the past 2.5 years is now 11.5% or approximately 4.5% per year.  It could be better but it could be worse.  Total dividends returned is almost $750.

 WFT is the worst performing stock at this time and has historically been subject to a lot of volatility in it's stock price.   LNR has made significant gains in the past 6 months and is just a few points shy of breaking even again.  Our technology holding GIB.A is up 78% and GC is up 63%.

If we look at the past year's performance of this portfolio, you can see that it pretty much did nothing. The TSX on the other hand had a stellar year returning 19%, mostly due to gains in the resource and energy positions.

Here's the May 2014 graph since inception.  Again it shows us 2016 was a pretty down year.

If however we compare the May 2014 portfolio returns to the TSX for the entire lifespan of the portfolio, we are still ahead of the TSX for the same period of time.  13% vs 6% so we should be happy about that.  Our dividend yield amounts to about 2% for this portfolio.

May 2015

The May 2015 portfolio has been doing well overall, except for our technology holding DH.  This stock has been the target of short sellers and is down 45%.  Most of the other stocks are showing double digit returns with ATD.B, WPK AND NA being the star performers.  

With a modest return of 3% google finance shows us the monetary return as $521. However you can see that our dividends did really well on this portfolio giving back $675, which more than doubles our portfolio yield.

 The performance graph of 2016 shows that the May 2015 portfolio was fairly stable throughout the past year except for the sharp drop in mid November.  I think it has some correlation to our DH holding.

Without any energy or resource holdings in our portfolio, we did not experience the same growth as the TSX in the past year.  The May 2015 portfolio returned 3.6% vs the TSX 19%.

If we look at the performance graph since portfolio inception.  The May 2015 portfolio shows 7.8% which I believe includes our dividend yield vs the TSX average of 3%.

May 2016

Our newest portfolio is giving us a 5% return, not bad given that it is only about 7 months since it's inception. The worst performing stock is NWC which was the stock I subbed in at the last minute. The three best performing stocks in this portfolio are ITP, RNW and ECI each giving us double digit gains.

If you will recall, I had a second look at ET when I started my portfolio creation and decided it wasn't where I wanted it to be in terms of performance.  However NWC hasn't really given us any stellar returns either. In fact it is underperforming ET right now.  ET is only down 1% whereas NWC is down over 6%. Doh.

 The May 2016 performance graph since May of this year.

Again without any resource or energy stocks in our portfolio, we didn't have the same returns as the TSX, but we were pretty close.  The TSX returned 11% in the past 7 months, and the May 2016 portfolio did just over 8%.  The dividend yield on this portfolio is therefore around 3%.

It should be noted that the performance graph characteristics of the portfolio tracked pretty closely to the TSX except that after Donald Trump's election win, our portfolio started to underperform the TSX.

Summary

Portfolio and total overall returns (inclusive of dividend yield)

May 2014 - 13%
May 2015 - 7%
May 2016 - 8% (for 7 months)

It should be interesting to see what unfolds in 2017, which I expect will be a year of revelations and surprises, thanks to the Donald.