Last month, I did in a couple days something which I’ve never ever done before since I started on my investing journey: I sold some shares!
When I first began investing I wanted as much as possible to follow the age-old mantra of ‘my holding period is forever’. It’s been about 8 years since I bought my first stock (QAF, which I’m still holding on to btw), and I decided it was a good time to review my portfolio and make some strategic changes as it crosses the $300,000 milestone (another post to follow!)
Selling? Selling!!
I took a hard look at my portfolio and realised that there are a few long time losers which I’ve been holding on for perhaps a little too long.
Some of them range between a 20-40% loss, and although the individual current value of those stocks don’t exceed $5,000, they haven’t been good investments in the sense that the unit prices have been steadily decreasing over the last 2-4 years.
I’ve not really bothered about them because they form a really small part of my total portfolio, and I just wanted to leave them be to see how they eventually pan out.
The tipping point for deciding to take action on them came not because something fundamentally drastic changed, but rather because I became quite tired of being inundated by stacks of AGM invites and scrip dividend schemes all the time *laughs*.
I mean, regardless of whether I own $100,000 or $100 of a stock, I still get the same amount of plastic and paper for each of them in the mail. Furthermore as most companies have already shifted to a electronic version of their annual report, all I get in the mail is a small pamphlet with papers teaching me how to access the actual report.
It came to a point where I was just a bit too tired of tearing and recycling so much paper and plastic for so many companies, most of the times without even reading them.
The ones I’ve sold all positions in: IREIT Global, Tuan Sing, DigiCore, Fu Yu.
Unfortunately for Tuan Sing I have some odd number of shares and I will need to get in touch with my broker to sell these away…
Entering the S&P500
As I reflected a bit on this over the last couple weeks, I came to the realization that I am still very noob and a greenhorn at picking stocks. Even though on a grand scale I have more winners than losers, I find that I’ve had more losers than what I’m comfortable with.
And so with the liquidation of these stocks along came the question of where and how I should redeploy the realised funds in a smarter and wiser way.
I’ve always wanted to get in on the S&P 500 because I’ve heard of how suitable it is for a more passive and long term approach to investing. Also, diversifying geographically into a he US market sounds pretty neat too.
After doing some research, I’ve put the money into CSPX as, with the innate mechanism of automatic dividend reinvestment, it seems to be the laziest and ‘cheapest’ option. Perfect for me! Pretty excited to see how that pans out over the mid-long term.
In addition to the one-off injection, I’ll also be allocating a portion of my monthly investible funds into this as well.
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