It is surprising how the global stock markets are capable of shrugging off just about any news headline recently. This week was no different. The pandemic keeps wreaking havoc in many developing countries and of course in the US as a second wave in Europe seems inevitable now. Check out these great graphs from the Financial Times.
On Wednesday the CEOs of the largest 4 tech companies, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook appeared before a US Congress Committee to be “grilled” on anti-trust accusations. You can’t say anyone of them lost their cool, really, and when the same companies all reported their Q2 earnings after the close the following day on the one hand it seemed that as if there is nothing to stop them from hoarding cash, and on the other it does reinforce the point of whether there is fair competition and reasonable profit.
The US markets were up this week, especially the Nasdaq, while the World Stocks Index was mostly flat. Italy saw a sharp decline, just shy of 5%, and the European stock markets in general were also down (Stoxx index fell by 2.6%). The other stock market we watch closely, the Nasdaq Copenhagen, was less badly hit with a 1.4% loss and continues to outperform most European stock markets.
We keep finding great investment opportunities in the Italian stock market. A classic rule when it comes to personal finance is to invest in what you know. This past week I have sent two new buy alerts, one for mid-cap in the Industrial sector called IMA (which is already up 14% since my buy alert) and another one for a Consumer Cyclical stock called Elica, both traded on the Italian stock market.
I am disappointed by the recent weakness in WeBuild which tanked 21% this week. This is a good example of why focusing only on valuation is not sufficient to pick (or deciding to stick with) a stock: if the market is against it, you won’t see it grow. With the 38.2% fib level broken, there is the risk of further depreciation. I will look into it more closely in due course and send an alert if I sell/reduce/accumulate.
I realised that one of our SQQQ position was incorrectly reported despite the ETF having hit our SL price of 8.1$: apologies for the inconvenience.
So far we have not included dividends in the total return and I will endeavor to add this information in a future update as some of our stocks have already paid a quarterly dividend since the inception of the RI portfolio.
The table below summarises the portfolio performance since inception.
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