Hola amigos, ¿Qué tal? 🙂

April is long gone and finally in the books here at the ‘hopefully one-day millionaire looking guy’. I think the cover says how the big picture looked like in April.

Quick Recap of April Numbers

  • Portfolio value: 97,039 € (-0.4%) – details HERE
  • Monthly Transactions (Deposits – Withdrawals): 1,255 €
  • Monthly growth from investments: – 2,334 €
  • Passive income: -6,915 € – details HERE

Now, let’s get into the details.

Portfolio Performance

Please note, links containing an asterisk (*) are either affiliate or referral links. P2P lending is a risky business, so you could end up losing all your invested money if you choose to join any of these platforms.

** 20 % discounted as future withdrawal tax payments

I changed the way I calculate the total rate of returns. Before I used a monthly (time) weight of return to count in changes on currency exchanges and monthly contributions, but that was way too complicated, so I am just taking a shortcut here using simply the total growth divided by total invested.

Stocks did well in April gaining pretty much of what had been lost in the previous months. I am as confused as everyone else on the reasons why the stock market is recovering amid most of the population still being quite affected by the lockdown, but I can’t be bothered to spend time on this matter.

On the P2P side, I wrote off my investments with Grupeer, as according to their latest announcement it does not look we’ll get our investments anytime soon if any at all! That’s a painful -7,323€ vanished.

There’s a lawsuit being set which I may participate or I may not, I haven’t decided yet. If I do, then that will be my third lawsuit set in place. What a fun story! Algotechs legal action is still on since I wrote this, moving on but slowly. Responsible for similar or correlated scam organizations have been put into jail and police has located offices in Bulgaria used to operate ‘business’. Envestio case is also advancing.

As you can see, there’s a lot of action here on my blog, so don’t forget to subscribe! – just kidding! 😛

Besides Grupeer’s write-off, my portfolio value stays close at what it was last month, thanks to stocks springing back, a pound gaining against the euro and my monthly contributions. So, good on that!

This month I also managed to update my net worth for the first quarter of 2020.

In regards to passive income… well… no comment!

Stocks & Shares ISAs (Core Portfolio)

My stocks & shares ISA grow 3575.4€ incurring a 6.7% increase.

In April I made the first move to start simplifying my investments. I’d like to focus my core portfolio towards passive investing using global funds trackers as a vehicle, automated and as much hands-off as possible.

So, as the new tax year started in April I opened a new S&S ISA with Trading 212. We can only contribute to one S&S ISA per tax year, so I’ll be paying myself £600 per month to purchase Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF USD Accumulation (GBP) | VWRP for the time being.

If you’d like to give Trading 212 a try, please consider using this link, and we both get a free share worth up £100.

I made a reassuring transaction in my other ISA (Vanguard). I sold all my corporate bonds to purchase a global index bond (Vanguard Global Bond Index Fund GBP Hedged Accumulation). I was concerned about the stability of corporate bonds. Many companies are going bust and lending my money for a 3% miserable interest doesn’t look super appealing to me. In fact, corporate bonds crashed in March, but luckily the FED moved to buy corporate debt, otherwise, my bonds wouldn’t have looked green! But, how much I can trust my own judgment on this since I am far from being a professional on the subject? Not much. So what I did was to buy a global bond and fuck it forgot about it!

USD Corporate Bond crash during Covid-19
USD Corporate Bond crash during Covid-19

Alternative Investment Portfolio

Most of my alternative investments keep doing poorly. They now make 27% of my portfolio against the 10% I’d like it to be. Putting on the side Grupper, which I already discussed above, I’ll run through my other P2P investments quickly.

Please note, links containing an asterisk (*) are either affiliate or referral links. P2P lending is a risky business, so you could end up losing all your invested money if you choose to join any of these platforms.

All dividend payments from Property Partner* are on hold until June, so no income whatsoever from this end.

I had barely any income from Crowdestor*, as at the moment only one of my investments is carry on with payments as usual.

I only have three investment with Evoestate*, two holiday rentals in Spain that are not generating any income and an office building in Tallinn, Estonia that is on track with payments.

Housers*, only 5 out of my 10 current investments paid.

Things seem to be going reasonably well at Robo.cash* so far. Fingers crossed.

Same goes for Estateguru* and Crowdestate*. I am surprised that all my investments at Crowdestate* are still pretty much on track, as it seems others are not having the same experience. I guess I was lucky with choosing investments that still run fine.

Ratesetter halves interest rates to get ready for future defaults by loading up the provision fund. I had max rates of 4%, which will be 2% for the rest of the year. That’s lower than my 3% rates from TSB bank! Hah!

FastInvest* keeps paying but faces long withdrawal queues. The platform recently introduced a flat withdrawal fee of 1.5€, so I will possibly withdraw only once per month from now. Another possibility is to leave it in a gamble it as I don’t have that much in.

Dividend Portfolio

There has not been much activity in my dividend portfolio in April.

This is the outlook of my holdings after the closing bell on the 30st of April:

Dividend portfolio holdings April 2020 one million journey

Dividend Payments

Only one of my holdings distributed divided, so there’s not much to celebrate here.

AstraZeneca (AZN): 1.67€

Total Income in March: 1.67 €

AstraZeneca is a London based pharmaceutical and drugmaker company that is getting a lot of attention as it is helping to develop a vaccine in the UK, and has recently partnered with the University of Oxford. That has reflected positively on the share price. The funny thing is that I had never heard about this company before, I just have in the portfolio as it is a free share that was given to me. The dividend felt great. Free money, generating free money!

New Holdings And Purchases

9 Danone (BN) shares @ 61.92 NEW POSITION

1 National Grid (NG) share @ p953.4 FREE SHARE

2 Wells & Fargo (WFC) shares @ 30.01

2.4 AT&T (T) shares @ 31.30

6 Invesco (IVZ) shares @ 8.95

My new position, Danone, is another consumer defensive stock-based in Paris (France) and operates in the food and beverage industry. I chose Danone because of its brand and business model, which offers a health-focused portfolio of products while contributing to fight the climate change (though I don’t know if that will be necessary any more thanks to Covid-19??). I am also a sporadic consumer of Alpro plant-based products, a brand owned by Danone.

Danone's brand and business model
Danone’s brand and business model

Danone reported an LFL +3.7% sales growth in Q1 2020 but the full-year guidance was withdrawn given the lack of visibility related to COVID-19. So, an investment in this company is a bet (as most of my other holdings) The company pays a dividend once a year only (postponed for 2020) and I think is expected to be 2.1 euros per share which are above the 3% yield at current prices.

Investing in companies like Danone gives me a good feeling. I don’t expect much from my dividend portfolio, it’s not a try to beat the market at all, but just to have a bit of fun while I invest in business I like.

The €45K Project Fund

I’m sticking with Abundance for another tax year. After doing a bit of research I did not find many ethical P2P platforms that look convincing to me, and cosidereing that I have less than £1K in I don’t think is worth to open another IFISA.

So, £50 that went into the still funding ‘Liverpool Community Homes Debenture 2’ project. I am not so sure there will get this one funded as the minimum target is 4 million but only 329K has been successfully funded.

So far, I have recovered 2.08% of my loss = 937.9 EUR

44,062.1 EUR left to go.

This is advancing very slowly. To “leverage it up”, I’ll contribute any affiliate or AdSense income I may get in the future, but still donating 50% at the year-end.

Related content: How I FIRED 45k with algo trading, Investing Ethically, Recovering €45K through Investing in Myself First

The giveaway winner is Dr. FIRE!

Congratulations my friend! And thanks to all those who participated:

It was a good fun, so I may do this again in the future 🙂

This is it for this month, be back in June. You guys take care and stay safe.