Journey into Investing

Robinhood is an online investment brokerage that offers commission-free stock, ETF, and options trading.  While Robinhood used to stand out as one of the only brokers to offer commission-free trading, their model has forced a lot of the bigger brokers to follow suit to remain competitive.  Robinhood offers both web and mobile trading, but can leave something to be desired with it's bare bones model.  So let's take a look at some of the Pro's and Con's as they relate to Robinhood. Pros: - No account minimum - Simple user interface - Commission Free Trading - Fractional Shares - Available for some user coming for all users in the near future If you are new to investing and just looking to get started investing then Robinhood is a great way to get started.  For users new to investing the simplistic design of Robinhood's app makes it very easy for a user to understand and use.  Robinhood's basic search functionality will not leave new users overwhelmed with a lot of...

Weekly Recap: Another up and down week in the market that saw my Robinhood portfolio following suit.  A strong trading day on Friday had my portfolio update $58.66 or 2.29% for the week.   I have also been taking a deep look at my finances over the last week and while I would love to continue trying to dump as much money as possible into my portfolio, I have realized that while investing is a good thing it is kind of a wash with gain if I continue to carry my current debt load.  So I have begun working on a plan to accelerate paying off all my debt minus my mortgage as fast as possible.  So with that said I will be sticking to only depositing $100 a month into this account and diverting every thing possible to paying off my debt.  Why pay a credit card company 14-20% in interest while only getting back maybe 4% from investments.  Once the debt is paid off them I can really start growing my investment accounts at a much more rapid pace.   ...

This week was pretty much a wash overall.  The week started off good as my portfolio value was up by around $117 by the close of Wednesday, but come the end of the week all the gains were gone and then some.  For the week I was actually down $23.  With that said that did not stop me from making some additions to my portfolio. Purchases: Realty Income( O ): I bought 5 shares of Realty at $50.45 which is currently down about 33% over the last three months with most of that coming during the crash in March.  Realty Income is a Real Estate Investment Trust or REIT and REIT's usually maintain higher dividend yields due to the fact that they are required to pay out 90% of taxable income back to shareholders.  I see the potential to earn via growth in the stock price as well as the bonus of the dividend that is paid out on a monthly basis. Alerian MLP ETF( AMLP ): I bought 10 shares of Alerian at $4.63.  Alerian is an Exchange Traded Fund or ETF that t...

The trading week is over so let's take a look back at the past week and see how things went for my Robinhood portfolio. Let's start out by taking a look at the transactions that I made for the week.  I did sell a couple of items to do a little re-balancing within my portfolio.  Overall I added another $410 to my investment account this week.  While this is not going to be typical I have been trying to buy as much as I can while the market has been down. Transactions for the week So how did my portfolio fair this week, as you can see below I was up 2.05% for the week and it was kind of up and down all week.  Overall my Robinhood portfolio is up 42.16% or $510.08 in value. Weekly Portfolio Trend So I've been doing a lot of buy lately to start trying to generate passive income through dividend payments and because of that it will probably be a little while before I can start reporting weekly dividend payments. If you are looking to get starte...

As the stock market continues it's roller coaster ride brought to you by COVID 19 I continue to buy as much as I can with a preference towards stocks that pay dividends.  Today I decided to do a little bit more buying after the markets closed down yesterday.  So what did I buy today? The first things I bought wasn't actually a stock it was an ETF.  What is an ETF you might ask?  An ETF is a Exchange-Traded Fund which is basically a basket of securities that are traded like a stock.  This means you can buy into the fund and not have to worry about the individual performance of specific stocks. First Trade of the day: I bought 8 shares of SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF( SPYD ) at a cost of $25.68 each.  This ETF tracks an index of the 80 highest-yielding stocks from the S&P 500, so instead of having to buy into 80 different stocks I bought into a fund that contains 80 different high dividend yield stocks and when they payout dividends ...

COVID 19 has done some serious damage to the world economy and has caused huge loses in investment markets.   While this can be scary to a lot of people to me I see opportunity.  Investing for me is a long game and I am not in this to make a quick buck, so when the markets drop that means you have more buying power. As COVID 19 has shut down most of the country it has caused major financial loses for a lot of companies and those loses have translated big drops in stock values.  A good example of this is Disney.  As you can from the graphic below Disney's stock is down just over 28% of the last 3 months. What does that mean to you?  Disney will bounce back from this drop so you have an opportunity to buy a stock that was trading at around $150 a share just 3 months ago.  So buying now gets you a deep discount with a lot of upside when the price goes back up you are seeing positive value from the stock price, but you will also be able to receive div...