These are my buys from Q1 2021

A lot of you have asked my about my own purchases in the past few months. Due to time constraints I haven’t been able to churn out monthly posts about my buys so I decided to post them every quarter, just like I did last time. This gives me some more ‘wiggle room’ and still keeps you updated, my fellow FIRE friends!

As you’ve read in the past I’ve been working on my geographical diversification, with a focus on non-US stocks. When I previously did an analysis on my portfolio, one fellow DGI investor also noted that I relied heavily on US stocks. Something which I also discovered and was already working on, as you can see in my buys from Q4 2021.

So basically I continued on my set course and added some more Dutch/EU dividend stocks:

Date	Ticker	# Shares
26/01/2021	Ahold Delhaize N.V.	34
01/03/2021	Ahold Delhaize N.V.	34
24/03/2021	Unilever PLC	17

Love me some stocks!

I’m still adding 650,- euro every month and since my broker doesn’t support DRIPS I manually reinvest every dividend received. The awesome thing to behold is that with my growth over the past few years is that, on average, I receive 130,- euro in dividends every month. So that means I add about 780 euro’s of fresh capital to my portfolio every month!

So where these my only buys? Yes and no, they were my only buys on the stock market but wih the Crypto market going insane I also added some capital to that portfolio. I’ve added VET, BTT, and HOT to my portfolio. I might add some more on dips as the market continues to be extremely volatile.

And last but not least I made one more buy, a real silver bullion! More of an experiment really, since I’ve been reading about investing in silver for about three years. I’ve bought a Canadian Maple Leaf from 2014, the birth year of my eldest daughter to add some sentiment to it (and maybe justify the purchase to my wife :)). I really like it, but so far it hasn’t triggered me to fill up an entire pirate chest of these coins.

There you have it, my buys from the first quarter of 2021!

Crypto-holdings update

As some of you know I experimented a bit in cryptocurrency last year. Although I didn’t post anymore about it, I actually did some moves in this space so I thought that I’d give you all an update on this speculation.

Originally I bought Ripple coins (XRP) for the amount of €500,-. or 2641 coins at a price of €0,189. The idea at first was to hodl for the long term and see a steady rise in profit hopefully enough to pay for my mortgage 🙂

The reality was somewhat different though. After my initial purchase there indeed was a steady growth in the XRP price. As it grew I began to feel some pressure to sell it, so after a small rise I sold all my coins when the price hit €0,22. Realising a total profit of €81.08. NICE!

Since the price dropped again I decided to use my original €500,- and rebought XRP again at a price of €0.18500. The price dipped even further so I used my realised gains to buy additional XRP.

After it continued to rise in price I made some subsequent gains by selling batches of 100 coins at a time. After a few buys I decided it was time to branch out to other coins and to invest another €300,-.

Then the price of XRP rose to its peak above the $3:

Other coins continued to soar as well and eventually my investment of €800,- grew to a stellar €4165,29. Amazing unrealised gains & profits, it grew bigger then I dared hope when I first invested in this new technology.

Your probably wondering, dude did you sell at this high?!? Alas, my answer is no. In my infinite wisdom I decided that if it could grow to $3+, it could also go to $10 right?

Well apparantly so far the answer is no. After this great rally, all coins,including XRP made a nosedive and returned to lower values.

Long story short I now have a small portfolio consisting of Ripple (XRP), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Tron (TRX), EOS, and Electroneum (ETN).

The average value of this portfolio is between €1200 – €1600 euro although it crossed €2000 again three weeks ago and went down again after that. At the time of writing the value is €1264,73.

So far so good with a healthy €450,- profit in about 9 months time, but boy what a ride it has been and continues to be. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure!

Got any experiences of your own? Please share in the comments!

 

 

 

 

 

 

A different buy: Crypto Coin – Ripple

As you have seen on different blogs, a part of the community has jumped on the crypto-bandwagon. I have been interested in crypto currencies for multiple years, actually owning a mining rig for a few months to mine LTC (Litecoin). Unfortantely I did not have the foresight to just buy bitcoins when they were cheap but my interests in the subject never wavered.

After reading the blog of Investmunt Hunting on his purchases I was triggered again to do something with my ongoing interests. So after some investigating I decided to buy into the Ripple coin.

Ripple’s website describes the opensource protocol as “basic infrastructure technology for interbank transactions – a neutral utility for financial institutions and systems.” And it already has the attention of large parts of the financial and banking world.

The protocol allows banks and non-bank financial services companies to incorporate the Ripple protocol into their own systems, and therefore allow their customers to use the service. Currently, Ripple requires two parties for a transaction to occur: first, a regulated financial institution “holds funds and issues balances on behalf of customers.” Second, “market makers” such as hedge funds or currency trading desks provide liquidity in the currency they want to trade in. At its core, Ripple is based around a shared, public database or ledger that has its contents decided on by consensus. In addition to balances, the ledger holds information about offers to buy or sell currencies and assets, creating the first distributed exchange. The consensus process allows for payments, exchanges and remittance in a distributed process. According to the CGAP in 2015, “Ripple does for payments what SMTP did for email, which is enable the systems of different financial institutions to communicate directly.”

 

Market capitalization overview:

As of April 2017, members of the network known as the Global Payments Steering Group (GPSG) are Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Royal Bank of Canada, Santander, Standard Chartered, UniCredit and Westpac Banking Corporation. The group will “oversee the creation and maintenance of Ripple payment transaction rules, formalized standards for activity using Ripple, and other actions to support the implementation of Ripple payment capabilities.”

15 of the 50 largest banks in the world are already testing with the Ripple Network and it has received investment capital from Google Ventures, China Growth Capital and other like Standard Chartered, Accenture Ventures, SCB Digital Ventures, and SBI Holdings.

So what did I do? I opened an account at an online trader and bought €500,- worth of Ripple Coins (XRP). I received (minus the fees) about 2641 coins at a price of €0,189. Part of what interested me on this coin was the relatively low valuation of the coin similar to the early days of Bitcoin.

So is this an investment or a gamble? I think it is a bit of both to be honest. Technically it is an value investment since I hope that the coin will steadily grow in value so I can make a healthy profit when the coins hits $1 (or maybe $15? :)) and I sell them. But with the volatility (in 1 week + 40% and now -12%) of the crypto currencies this is a lot more of a gamble then my dividend stocks.

So anyone else decided to start buying crypto currencies?