5%+ Dividend Yield Portfolio: Winning In A Tough Market (Feb 2020 Review)

Published Tue, 03 Mar 2020 15:43:55 -0500 on Seeking Alpha

My -4.8% performance beat by the -7.5% of the S&P 500 in February.
My Feb dividends disappointed with a 50% monthly drop from last year.
However, my dividend yields remain over 5% (versus the under 2% mark for the S&P 500).
I stayed away from active trading in February but might do some bargain shopping in March.
Musings
No one wants to be ‘the guy that lost less’ - since you are still losing. However, I am proud of the way my portfolio has handled 2020’s volatility to date. While I am still down -6.9% in 2020, the S&P 500 is down -7.5% (and I beat the index by almost 300 bps in February).

In general, the pain in the market was wide-ranging with no strategy, factor, or sector spared (unless you happened to be long volatility).

Source: S&P Dow Jones
February 2020 Review
February 2020 (like January before it) ended with a thud as virus fears took most indexes to double digit losses for the last week of the month. For February, the S&P 500 posted a -7.5% which I meaningfully outperformed with a -4.8%. In 2020, I am tracking at -6.9%, which is beating the S&P 500’s -7.5%. For the last 12 months, I am flat which lagged the 8.8% gains for the index. However, my 5.0% projected dividend yield keeps crushing the 1.7% yield of the index.
As for pure cash yield, February 2020 rewarded me with realized dividends of $636 (versus $1,272 in 2019…an unpleasant 50% decrease). For the last 12 months, my portfolio delivered $16,320 in cash to me (down 2% YoY). My realized yield for the trailing twelve months was 5.0% for my full portfolio including cash reserves. I will have some work to do to beat my ambitious 2020 yield goal of over $18,000 for the year (an ~10% increase over 2019).
Fear and greed are hard to balance, but I am happy with where I am overall. My yield focused strategy still makes the most sense to me as paper gains may come and go but cash is forever!!
Background
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