Amigos, welcome to another portfolio update, this time being for the month of September 2020.

Quick Recap of September Numbers

  • Portfolio value: 105,781 € (+0.35%) – details HERE
  • Monthly Transactions (Deposits – Withdrawals): 2,011 €
  • Monthly growth from investments: -116 €
  • Passive income: 127 € – details HERE

Once again the Pound Sterling currency value had a significant impact on the total value of my portfolio. Even though I contributed 2,011 Euros and had a market loss of only -116 €, I’ve sadly just enjoyed a gain of 377 €.

In August, the Pound was valued at 1.12 against the Euro, in September that drop to 1.10.

Ideally, it would make more sense to track my portfolio in pounds only, but since I have no plans of retiring in the UK, the value that matters to me is in Euros.

With the Brexit topic never coming to an end (Cheers Boris), I expect more fluctuations during the upcoming months. In the meantime, I will make sure that I, at least, enjoy from my passive income streams! ;-).

September Portfolio Performance

Please note, links containing a star (*) 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 estimate future withdrawal tax payments

That -31% total return keeps looking painful to me. The good side is that it still looks better than in February, where I carried a -36% loss.

I recently got some good news in regard to the Algotechs case. If you live in Denmark and read some news about Kobenhavn Andelskasse and Moorwand in the upcoming weeks, think about me of being one step closer to get some money back.

I still hold some hope that I will be able to recover some of my loses. Proving that I could recover the 50% (total speculation), that would “inject me a dose” of 28K Euros of cash. I sometimes dream on the day this will happen, and what I will do with that cash (I am between going to Las Vegas or Ibiza)***

Stocks experienced some volatility in September. We saw a drop during the first three weeks and some recovery during the last one. The bullish trend seems to be continuing in October so far, but with the US elections right the corner…. your guess is as good as mine!

Alternative Investment Portfolio

In September I continued withdrawing capital from all platforms that allowed me to. The only exception is Crowdestate*.

My Alternative Investment Portfolio provided me with 75.31 Euros of passive income. That accounts for 59% of my total passive income this month.

I joined all the platforms I mentioned on my previous update, but I only contributed to Kiva. Energize Africa had no loans available to invest, and I was late to invest in Zoomash Qardus* loan.

The following are the platforms which I am currently invested in, classified from 1 to 9 by my level of contentment.

1. Crowdestate

I know some investors who are not happy with Crowdestate* due to some defaulted loans. My experience so far is different, as I managed to sell all loans on the secondary before they defaulted. Maybe that was just luck, but it doesn’t hide the fact of me being happy with the results I’ve got so far.

Furthermore, Crowdestate* affiliate program is not too attractive for affiliates, which translates into fewer people promoting this platform. Despite this, the platform is doing well as it’s funding an average of 7-8 loans a month easily.

In September, I had three principal repayments and I sold the loan USL Invest OÜ (II) on the secondary market. That was after reading an announcement about the company not being able to fulfil loan obligations, and asking therefore for an extension. This is the homework you need to do when investing with Crowdestate, it’s not a platform for passive investors, you need to keep an eye on your investments.

As I am happy to keep my Crowdestate portfolio close to 2K, I reinvested the freed cash into three new development loans.

2. Estateguru

Things still keep running fairly well at Estateguru’s*.

My portfolio consists of 35 loans (40 last month), where 30 are being paid on time and 5 are late (6 last month). I have no defaulted loans so far and withdrawals are processed on the very next day. It is a shame there’s a 1 EUR fee per withdrawal execution though. I only withdraw once a month to avoid paying too much on fees.

My account value is 1.8K, I plan to keep withdrawing until I get down to 1.5K (at least for now).

If you want to give it a try, please consider using this link and get a 0.5% bonus on your investments made during the first three months.

3. Robo.cash

I placed all my long terms loans on Robo.cash* secondary market.

At the time of writing half have been already sold. I expect to exit the platform fully by the end of October.

4. Crowdestor

I was glad to see the renewed Crowdestor* dashboard. It allows me to track my investments in a fairly easy way. Out of 19 loans I am invested in, 5 are delayed.

Besides this, the company (finally) added a secondary market.

I’ve got a mixed feeling with this platform. The recently added secondary market is tempting me into trying to sell my loans and transfer the money into my Trading212 Stocks & Shares ISA.

5. RateSetter

RateSetter is having a tough year as it was forced to halve interest rates for the rest of 2020 in an attempt to stabilize their provision fund. Obviously this is better than facing bankruptcy or stopping all payments as Grupeer or Property Partner did.

I am on the slow process of trying to exit this platform. I requested all my funds back in August. There are 19,993 investors (20,559 last month) in front of me before I can withdraw my money.

At this speed, I could take me about 3 years (give or take) to get my money back…

6. Property Partner

Property Partner extended the suspension of all dividend payments to the 30th of September, so I’ve got no income whatsoever in September.

We were given an update on the situation and unfortunately it does not look good.

Out of my 9 investments, only 3 will pay me a dividend. Seeing how badly is the student accommodation going to the UK, I don’t expect this will improve any time soon.

7. Housers

Housers is a no-escaping-way total disaster. My Housers page speaks by itself.

Repayments for the Albufera loan should start soon. That should give a bit of an income lift for a few months (hopefully).

8. Fast Invest

Fast Invest finally processed my withdrawal request from June. I have no more pending withdrawals until I free the next 100 Euros.

Dividend Portfolio

September was a great dividend month. My dividend portfolio generated 47.9 EUR of passive income.

This is the outlook of my holdings at the end of the month:

Dividend portfolio update September 2020

I made a small amendment to my spreadsheet table. Before I showed the trailing annual dividend rate, which refers to the dividends that were paid to shareholders for the last 12 months. I exchange it to show the forward annual dividend rate instead, which shows an estimation to a company’s upcoming dividends for the year.

As some of my stocks suffered from a dividend cut or removal (Disney, Invesco and Wells Fargo), calculating the gross yield on cost using the trailing annual dividend rate was misleading.

My portfolio value decreased by -0.8%, but it is having a stronger performance during October, mainly as a cause of Invesco breaking through its resistance levet set at $11.5.

Invesco ticker price
Disclaimer: This is not a buying recommendation, but just a temporal graphical entertainment for your brain.

Dividend Payments

Ten companies paid dividend in September:

  • 3M (MMM): 6.62€
  • AstraZeneca (AZN): 1.52€
  • Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): 5.11€
  • Walgreen Boots (WBA): 5.37€
  • Unilever (UNA): 3.59€
  • Kroger (WBA): 3.24€
  • Microsoft (MSFT): 0.91€
  • Wells Fargo (WFC): 1.78€
  • Invesco (IVZ): 10.37€
  • Exxon Mobil (XOM): 9.41€

Total Dividend Income in September: 47.9 €

New Holdings And Purchases

  • Cisco Systems (CSCO) 3 share @ $38.95 *NEW POSITION*
  • Cisco Systems (CSCO) 2.65 share @ $39.43
  • Under Armour (UAA) 1 share @ $11.17 *FREE SHARE*
  • National Grid (NG) 1 share @ p848.8 *FREE SHARE*

In September, I reinvested all my dividends and added a new position into my dividend roaster: Cisco Systems. It’s a largely known company, so I’ll skip adding any details.

I was meant to add more European or British stocks. The truth is that I am struggling to find companies that I like. Data and information for US stocks is much easier to find.

There are many aspects of my portfolio that I would like to improve, but these take some time. Since I am doing it as a hobby, I prefer to pay more attention at clearing my alternative inventing portfolio before I dig any deeper into dividend investing.

The €45K Project Fund

Another month, another £54 saved as a non-smoker and put in the 45K Project Fund. In addition, I also contributed another £25.79 out of ads revenue.

There are still no new interesting projects on Abundance, so my cash is sitting on the platform, but it’s not invested.

Abundance is crowdfunding on Seeds. It initially sounded like an interesting way to put my sitting capital to use, but I’ve never invested this way before and I certainly don’t want to make things more complicated than they already are for just a hundred pounds, so I skipped this one.

As I mentioned earlier, I contributed some money to Kiva after receiving my first Google AdSense payment.

To add some more excitement to the recovery process, I decided to include my Kiva donations to the 45K Project Fund :D.

(If that makes nonsense to you, please read my August update to understand how Kiva works).

The 45K Project Fund consists of:

  1. Abundance Investment: 1,247.4 EUR
  2. Kiva: 42.26 EUR

So far, I have recovered 2.86% of my loss = 1,289.66 EUR

43,710.34 EUR left to go.

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

This is it for this month, I’ll be back next month. Wherever you are I hope you have a great month. And cheers for reading, you are a star :D.

***Spanish joking style.