Month in Review - November 2019

 

So it is November 2019, it has been one month since I started putting some of our cash each month into other investments. Specifically we are using Commsec Pocket, see here for my review of Commsec Pocket, and I have caught the investing bug. Like many bugs, this one has some negatives associated with it.

End of Month Portfolio Position Summary

Before I get into that see below for the state of our portfolio at the end of November. There is now something to see and compare to the month before. The red shows the cash that we have invested and the blue is the capital growth that we have experience in the month. In total at the end of this month we have now had a 4.06% capital growth increase with a dollar value of $123.50. Over the course of 2 months this is an incredible capital growth rate, however I am not looking to withdraw this at the moment, it is nevertheless nice to see some positive growth with our investments.

Portfolio Position Nov 2020

Monthly Summary

I have opened the Commsec Pocket app an unhealthy number of times, getting excited at the sight of green and dejected at the sight of red. I thought this might happen but even so it is hard to adjust my mindset away from checking it everyday. I have been putting cash into these investments that I am not intending to withdraw for a very long time so there really is no need to check how it is doing every day.

There has been no update to the status of our Permanent Residency application so we are still in saving mode, putting cash away to hopefully buy a home in the future. We did spend a little bit of time this month attending open homes, however not actually being able to purchase anything just made this process frustrating. We wont be doing that again until we are in a position to actually purchase something. 

We have continued with the investments into Commsec Pocket this month with two further investments of approximately $500 dollars into each of  two other ETF's. This month's investments being Sustainability Leaders and Health Wise. 

This is total investment growth of $1000 dollars in the month and our average invested per month is now is sitting at approximately $1500. This is higher than we will be able to maintain consistently, but again we are attempting to make up for some lost time.

We have now invested a total of $3,044 dollars into 6 ETF's and have experienced a capital growth of $123.50 since the investments began. This is a 4.06% return on investment over 2 months which on an annualised basis would be over 24% growth. This figure feels great, but also when compared to returns on a savings account or similar feels unsustainably high, so I am sure we will see a pull back in this rate of growth as time goes on. 

As of now all of our investments are currently sitting in Commsec Pocket. 

Some lessons learned in the month, in no particular order

• If you don't need or intend to sell your investments, don't look at them often. Let them do what they need to do.
• Unless you can predict the future investments are just as likely to go down in value as they are to go up in value.
• Brokerage costs immediately make your investment values appear lower than market values, this is natural and there is nothing to worry about.
• Diversification is nice, while it would be great to see all of your investments rising, this is not always the case, having multiple diverse investments allows the positives to balance out the negatives.