Author: responsibleinvestor892405851

$INDA and $EWZ : two ETFs to invest in G20 stock markets

ETFs are an efficient way of investing in markets or sectors for which one would otherwise have to hold multiple positions to reproduce. This is especially true is you have a limited capital to invest, say up to 10k Euro or Dollars.

We opened a 2% position in $EWZ which reproduces the Brazilian stock market. While the outbreak seems to be nearing the peak only now over there, the stock market fall has been so significant that some of the stocks in that market are greatly undervalued, e.g. Petrobras. As always, we will be vigilant and prepared to act if the outlook changes.

We also hold a 2% position in $INDA which mirrors the Indian stock market. I have opened this one due to a favourable technical pattern, something I do rarely as I am mainly guided by fundamentals when selecting stocks and ETFs.

Brazil and India

At present I have 21 open trades (4 of which at $SQQQ trades bought at different price levels). When I am fully invested, I target having 30-40 open trades with an average percentage of 3% each, though some positions may be higher or smaller depending on the strategy. It is very important to be diversified across the various sectors but also to have enough positions to avoid being severely affected by a major swing in an investment with too high a relative weight. While this limits the potential for greater gains, it does protect you on the downside and makes your portfolio more resilient.

Here are the 4 trades in my eToro portfolio from this past week (May 18th to May 22nd):

  • $AMAT +5%
  • $XLK +2 %
  • $DUE.DE +2% (thanks to the positive Zew numbers in Germany, we might be back)
  • $EWZ +2% (we might be back in this one too)

The US stock market is up about 3% this week and 5 of my positions have outperformed them, namely $KO, $SYF, $USO, $IRM, $VIAV. The European stock markets have also grown by about 2%.

In my eToro portfolio I am 35% in cash, 8% in hedges and the rest are long positions in stocks and, to a lesser extent, ETFs and cryptocurrencies.

$SQQQ as a hedge proved to be a winner

Over the past two weeks the market has been quite choppy, especially intraday, but overall it has continued to hold. In fact, the Nasdaq has gained 4.4% and the S&P500 1.1% while the Dow was basically flat at -0.2%.

The difference in performance can be explained by the stocks which compose these indices, with the Nasdaq obviously being packed with many technology stocks which have been outperforming most indices. To give a couple of examples, one of the technology ETF $XLK is up 5.1% this past two weeks, and the so called FAANG stocks are all above 4% with $NFLX up 9.4%.

The relative lack of technology stocks in the European indices, which are dragged down by many bank stocks ($XLF), is the main reason why the European stock markets have been laggards. The financial sector was already suffering from the dovish monetary policies of various areas of the world, with negative interest rates in Japan and Europe for example. The pandemic has only increased their pain as money printing continued everywhere, including the US.

Some say that March 23rd is when the markets bottomed: since then the 3 main US indices have recovered a lot of the previous losses due to the pandemic crisis with a gain ranging between 27 and 31%, while the European stock market has only rebounded by 14%. When they say that it is a market of stocks rather than a stock market, what they mean is that you have to pick the right indices if you want to invest in ETFs, or the right stocks if you want to have more chances of beating the market.

Here are my top 3 winners for these past two weeks:

$SQQQ +6.96% (this is a hedge)

$AMAT +5.07%

$BMY +4.51%

The earnings seasons is not over but its pace is certainly slowing down with a lot fewer companies reporting earnings next week: the one I will be watching most closely is $BABA on Friday.

If you want to see which stocks, ETFs and currencies I own in my eToro portfolio, please follow this link.

Have a great weekend everybody and invest responsibly !

Featured stock of the month: $CHTR Charter Communications

Charter Communications (ticker: $CHTR ) is a media sector company which provides cable services to residential and commercial customers in the United States.

It offers subscription-based video services and also provides internet services as well as other media-related services.

The company was founded in 1993 and is based in Stamford, Connecticut.

As of the end of last year it had 29 million residential and small and medium business customers.

It has a market cap in excess of 100 billion USD and can therefore be categorised as a large cap stock.

While it is currently trading at a trailing P/E of 61, it has a forward P/E of 26.6 which does not make it expensive considering that it is a growth stock with excellent track record.

In fact, based on current estimates, it is expected to grow its earnings by 45% over the next 5 years which corresponds to a 5 year expected PEG ratio of 0.84, implying that it is currently trading at a discount.

As it is a growth stock it does not offer a dividend. Despite that, it has profusely rewarded its investors over the past years, with more than a 36% capital appreciation per year in the last 3 years and a stunning 30% per year over the past 10 years. For comparison, investing in a S&P500 ETF over the same 10 years would have yielded a 9.4% annual return.

YTD the stock is actually up, sporting a 3.9% increase, while the S&P500 is down 11.8%.

Charter communications is also a primus inter pares (first among equals) as it has fared better than its peers and outperformed $XLC (a popular communications services ETF which also features the stock amongst its holdings) by 36% over the past year.

The stock has a beta of 0.8 which makes it less volatile than the stock market average.

The company reported Q1 earnings on May 1st missing expectations. However, it showed a significant rise in customer numbers as well as in revenue which made the stock go up after the earnings release.

From a technical analysis perspective, the stock is well above the Fibonacci 61.8% retracement line from its mid February 2020 highs which may indicate further short-term upside potential.

CHTR

If you want to find out which other long positions I hold in my eToro portfolio, please follow this link.

 

$CSX, $VIAV and $RR.L are my top 3 winners this week

Seven winners this past week ! Out of these, 3 were opened and closed in the same week and the rest I owned since earlier in 2020.

The top 3 winners where $CSX with a 10% gain in 5 days, $VIAV with a 5.01% gain in 2 weeks and $RR.L with a 4.90% gain in one day. While the future remains uncertain for Rolls Royce, I will look for opportunities to go back into CSX Transportation in the near future; also we still hold a 2% position on Viavi Solutions.

This week we have also gone back into Coca Cola (ticker: $KO ) which is a long term investment. The stock has dropped a lot and seems to have now stabilised with a potential breakout in sight. The dividend yield is 3.6% at these valuations and the stock goes ex-dividend early in June.

Aroundtown (ticker: $AT1.DE ) has been badly hit during this corona virus crisis, just like most of the real estate companies. We have previously invested in $AT1.DE and made a decent profit out of it. As the sector stabilises, it seems a good moment to go back in as it offers capital appreciation potential and sports a 5.2% dividend.

Just as the sentiment was turning on Thursday, I added to my $SQQQ position which played out really well as a hedge: the US markets were down between 2.5 and 3.2% on Friday, whereas my eToro portfolio was only down 0.39%. This highlights the importance of having hedges in times of volatility as the market can quickly change its course.

At this time, I am 58% in cash and have 5% in hedges (inverse ETF): if you don’t have enough cash, you won’t be able to take advantage of bargain stocks that will come your way in the future.

If you want to find out about all the positions in my eToro portfolio follow this link.

 

Four more winners, $TWTR and..

In a mixed week for the US stock market, ended on April 24th, we have made four more successful trades:

$TWTR +4.1%

$SYF +3.5%

$VLO +2.0%

$LH +2%

For some of these companies, under normal market conditions, I would continue to hold, rather than sell to lock in a small profit, however these are no normal conditions ! There is so much complacency right now and the market seem to price in not only the Fed interventions but the possibility that, if things get worse, the buying could extend to securities also.

Having said that I remain only 50% invested in my eToro portfolio so that a sudden market drop would not hurt as much and would give me enough fuel to enter more long positions after it stabilises again.

We have also initiated the following long positions last week:

$SQQQ this is a hedge for the reasons above

$PTON this is to attempt a ride on a popular stock

..plus another one which you are welcome to check out in my eToro portfolio.

The earnings season is in full swing: enjoy and invest responsibly !

 

Featured stock of the month: #Verizon $VZ

Verizon (ticker: $VZ ) has been a great investment for me so far, I have owned it for about 2 years now. It is one of the value stocks which offers both a solid dividend (>4%) and capital appreciation.

It is considered a 5G play and its deal with $DIS related to Disney+ has helped it soar.

Verizon is a mega cap, with a market value of 240B $. It currently trades at 58.13$ and it was trading at about 48$ when I bought it. This means a 20+% capital appreciation which outperformed the SP500 by 15 percentage points over the same period. And then you have to add the dividend, which was about 5% at the start of my investment and is now 4.28%. American stocks typically pay dividends out on a quarterly basis which gives you the option of re-investing more frequently than, say, most European stocks which pay a dividend on a yearly basis.

In terms of valuation, the stock is actually quite pricey at the moment and the projected total return over the next 5 years, including dividend, is of 41%. There are plenty of better valued stocks out there which offer a greater growth potential (even >100%), like $AMZN and $TSLA, but you probably want to combine more aggressive plays with other less volatile investments in order to stabilise your portfolio. In 2008, when the market was down 38.5%, Verizon was “only” down 21%. So far in 2020 Verizon is down 7% compared to a 15% fall of the SP500.

The stock has had a steep recover from the late March lows and is now trading above the 5 and the 50 moving average, with the 200 moving average within grasp.

VZ TA

It reports earnings for Q1 of 2020 on Friday the 24th of April. Consensus estimates are EPS of $1.22 and revenue of $32.37B.

If you want to see all the positions of one of my portfolios, you are welcome to follow me on eToro here.

 

A potential takeover target: Nokia $NOK

This week saw the first group of earnings come in with the financial sector under the spotlight. The big US banks did rather poorly, for the most part: this is for example the case for Wells Fargo, which we own in one of our portfolios, who took a 14.6% weekly loss while the Dow was up 2.2%. On the flipside, our other bank stock, the Bank of New York Mellon Corp (ticker: $BK ) reported better an expected earnings and ended the week with a 0.6% gain. Even within a badly hit sector, there can be outperformers.

But our last week’s biggest winners were Danone (ticker: $BN.PA ) and AstraZeneca, both European stocks, one operating in the food industry and the other in the pharmaceutical sector, who boasted a 9.1% and a 12.1% gain, respectively !

We have made several buys and sells this week. For starters we have locked in a 5.41% gain on Dexcom (ticker: $DXCM ). This company is so promising that I am sure we will be back, but I don’t trust this overly positive sentiment at the moment and, feet to fire, I would guess that next week the market may pause.

The ETF we own which reproduces the German stock market has run a lot lately, after a period of consolidation (those who swear by technical analysis would say “bull flag”), and this week we have exited the position on $EWG with a 7.12% gain in just 2 weeks !

Finally, we have closed our long position on gold, via the $GLD ETF, with a nice 5% gain in less than two months.

From the buy side, we have initiated a long position on Nokia (ticker; $NOK ) which is a potential takeover target. We’ll keep a close watch on it and if it plays out it can result in a significant upside.

If you want to see all the positions of one of my portfolios, you are welcome to follow me on eToro here.