March had quite some variabilitz built in itself. The start was good - then Silicon Valley Bank went under and brought the stock market with it. In the last days, a recovery ensued and the month closed slightly positive (+0.88%).
In terms of investments, I have the one-off which avoided a very boring month otherwise. Thanks to that money, I invested 10,000 Euro in the iShares Emerging Markets ETF. In the next one or two months I will make similar investments in the remaining two regions (Europe and North America). With that I hope to cross the 300,000K Euro of portfolio value.
In terms of dividends, I was expecting March to be big based on the historical payouts but the dividends delivered were somewhat underwhelming. Remember that this is one of the drawbacks of a dividend strategy: you cant control how much companies will pay out, so you need to consider that during a recession companies will prefer to keep the cash.
Despite having invested around 60,000 Euro in the last year, the dividends collected in March 2023 were 519 Euro, marginally above March 2022 (467 Euro)
Invesco S&P High Div Low Vol was the top contributor with 171 Euro, followed by iShares North America with 140 Euro. iShares Emerging Markets with 112 Euro was probably the biggest disappointment since per share it paid 30% less than one year ago. Vanguard All-World completes the picture at 97 Euro.
Let´s see where we go from here. Honestly, I would not mind if the market took a dive in the next month so that I could get more bang for my buck since I am planning to invest more than usual!
Write a comment