5%+ Dividend Yield Portfolio: Buying When Things Go On Sale (Mar 2020 Review)

Published Tue, 07 Apr 2020 15:45:41 -0400 on Seeking Alpha

My -23.4% March performance was the worst of my life (and lagged the -12.4% of the S&P 500).
However, my Mar dividends were up 44% from last year.
My dividend yields are now an insane 6.5% (versus the under 2% mark for the S&P 500).
Lots of trades in March (invested 80% of my cash reserves) but I will keep adding if it falls again.
Musings
Shorter update this month since life is too crazy to look backwards at the moment, plus I made a ton of trades to report (so no gory graphs demonstrating the pain I am sure that your portfolio dashboard is telling you). I don’t believe that any of the posted numbers (especially in the energy patch or REIT land) have any bearing to reality. Price discovery mechanisms that work under normal circumstances are now all over the place during this liquidity crisis. I think I was ‘down’ a -23% at the end of March, but I’m not selling so it doesn’t really matter what the print number is to me. All I know is that if the government is going to backstop the economy (through even more fiscal/monetary stimulus), then my holdings are going to be fine in the next couple years. So I’m just holding my breath, like most of everyone else, until that happens.
Well, technically I am not just holding my breath…in March I bought $35,000 worth of stock (about 10% of my portfolio value) that I had been holding in cash for a downturn (and I still have another 5% left). I tried to buy each 10% down, so I (of course) did not hit the bottom on any of my trades - but I feel better than if I had been fully invested at the time of the crash.
Stocks are on sale right now, but I don’t think we’ve hit ‘clearance’ prices yet. My gut tells me that the bottom is not yet in, so I will probably sell tactically into this bear rally before the current dreams of a May opening turn into a lost summer. However, I feel that I built a portfolio for the long term and I don’t have persuasive evidence to change course at this point. I... Read more