So a Memestock was my first Stock. What Now?

Interesting research note on Temple Bar: https://quoteddata.com/research/temple-bar-investment-trust-started-qd/

Right, so today marks the end of the first full month of my portfolio. In the hope that it might be of interest/help to some I'll give an update below, with some lessons learned etc. Just to recap, I made my first purchase of stocks on 17 March, and two further purchases before the end of March to set up my initial nine holdings, which are to be topped up as time goes by. During April I made three stock purchases on the 19th of Temple Bar, Ruffer and Monks (which almost immediately declined ha!). It will be a different three exactly 4 weeks later, and so on, so basically each stock will get topped up once a quarter (or thereabouts) by the same amount.

The breakdown of my holdings at the end of April is as follows:

The first lesson I learned is that it was probably a bad (expensive) idea to buy all 9 stocks with such low sums straight straight away. Basically, the commission for a UK stock is £1 plus the stamp duty which set me back straight off the bat by over 1% on each stock. The last two weeks in March were also not amazing for my stocks, but basically I was down because of the commission and tax. The following chart covers the 15th to the end of March:



It was not so bad at all for April because some of my stocks did ok and as I only made three individual stock purchases (rather than 11 as in March) the fees were not bad and did not cripple me as much as before. The following chart covers April, as of COB today:



So the performance for half of March and all of April works out at as below, giving an overall portfolio performance for the entire period of -1.17% (This and all % figures are True Time Weighted Rates of Return).



My takeaway from this is that April was a good month which I am very happy with, but that the commission off the bat was fairly hefty because my sums were so low. As time goes on the impact of the commission each month (minimum of $9.99, which with only 3 purchases is also the effective maximum) should get further diluted as the sums involved grow. Still a pain though, it would have been much better if T212 were set up and allowing new customers, and they also allowed you to transfer to another broker. The ideal would have been to trade "commission free" up to about 20k and then transfer to a "proper" broker like IBKR at that stage. But not much I can do about that, IBKR were the only show in town really. If I were doing it again it may have been a better idea not to buy all 9 stocks at once, but to have bought a smaller number of stocks but a greater amount of each, so percentage wise the commission would have been less.

In terms of stock performance, Berkshire and PCT have done really well, as has AGT. Temple Bar has lagged a bit. But 6 weeks is nothing so no judgements on anything can be made. The only thing I would add, is that there is a possibility that Berkshire could become significantly overvalued. For example, if Buffet turns around at the shareholders meeting and says that he will stop doing buybacks because the stock is overvalued (unlikely) or it seems that Berkshire is just trading away beyond what it is worth, I will stop buying it at that level, and instead invest in JP Morgan American Investment Trust until such time as thinking around the valuation of Berkshire changes. However, I don't see this happening anytime soon.

Someone had asked about the impact of currency. Each of the charts, and the figures etc. above are adjusted to Euro. However, if looked at in GBP (which all my stocks except Berkshire trade in) my portfolio is actually up, in the black, by 0.24%. However, I will stick with using Euro as my base currency even if performance looks better in other currencies But for interests sake, GBP monthly performance figures are below:

banie01 wrote: »

The work undertaken on GME and AMC by the lunatics on Reddit is very interesting.
With GME in particular, not only is much of the research over on r/Superstonk very compelling, the research is being externally reviewed and confirmed by well known experts who are also engaging with the community on Reddit and Twitter.

I threw money at both AMC and GME in late Jan and early Feb and on GME in particular I bought more at multiple times to average down my GME bep from 360 to well below half of that.
Similar with AMC, my plan is to let it ride to whatever the peak is and sell on the way down.
The naked shorts and the apparent wash trading to allow retail pressure on pricing to be mitigated has become quite apparent in the price action on limiting of certain fibre feeds since Monday has been very, very apparent.

The price moves this week, well they may be coincidental and my own trust in the current market condition could be driven by confirmation bias and coincidence.
So don't trust my assessment, that said.
If we do have any "apes" in here?
Well fúcking done lads!
There seems to be quite a few Irish lads on the Reddit sub, and the Bloomberg terminal info shows a surprisingly high number of shares owned here.

I still have half a GME share, will sell once it is in profit which it nearly is Can't wait for the book on GME