The September Merge

 

It's Labour Day, 2022 and stocks along with crypto continue to be in a funk. 

I usually add dates in my articles to give sort of a historical accounting of what's happening with investing in general, despite posts being dated.

The Blogs/Sites on my right sidebar have a common theme with the Markets being down these days. Stock prices may be down but their dividends remain on par or increase from year to year. 

Folks that manually reinvest their dividends received or "Drip" with automatic reinvesting usually at a discount, grow the number of stocks owned and in turn gain higher dividends at the next scheduled distribution date as mentioned in the posts on the right.

These days, many stock prices are down that will rebound so cheaper to buy and/or reinvest in my opinion instead of selling at a loss in panic mode.

I continue to focus on the top ten stocks in the TSX 60 which holds top companies by dividend yield and ETF/Funds that concentrate on Banks and Energy related with decent monthly dividends. Steady growth and patience is the name of the game for those who fund with what they can afford in these crazy days of high inflation, climbing interest rates along with living expenses/housing.

I had fun with Crypto once upon a time ... doing a lot of day trading and it was easier to win knowing where the market were going, along with large price range moves. Fast forward to today ... where Bitcoin gets influenced by stuff like US job stats and during the weekdays by S&P 500 plus Nasdaq (Tech loaded) moves ... it got a lot more complicated and frankly ... boring just watching so gave that up for the most part.

These days, I mostly hold the "coins" but still play with Ether (ETH) where I like it's price moves for Trades (usually ETH/USD) but it can get into a funk at times as well with general Trader indecision out there. 

Currently, it's probably just wise to hold on Ether where it moves from proof of work (Miners) to proof of stake in September called "The Merge" ... in about 9 days according to the count down. I'll wait until the dust settles on all that Techie stuff, see the result and all is good to go ... continue from there. 

The Dividend Calendar

 

Inflation continues to be the bad word as August, 2022 draws to a close and the schools open for another year here in Canada. Inflated prices puts more stress on a lot of people as supply and demand continues to drive the cost of the essentials up like groceries. I'm sure some prices go up "just because" the topic of inflation rules for now and for no other reason.

Other factors such as employees in unionised workplaces demand more of an increase when contract time rolls around. Other companies raise salaries slightly to keep employees so they add that onto their product prices.

Meanwhile, a lot of folks adjust their spending to keep rising expenses inline as best they can and put off extras and with the wired world, that means less Tech stuff, which affects quite a few Tech related stocks.

With the stocks, I continue to concentrate on oil/pipeline, banking, insurance and telecom stocks and September is a busy month for some of these Canadian stocks the have ex-dividend dates coming up.

With several stocks on the current BTSX portfolio, going ex-dividend in September

Too many to mention here but there are many sites that list ex-dividend dates per weekday, per week or month to receive cash distributions from stocks. One decent source is Investing.com and it's Dividend Calendar where one can filter by country and date range. My bank's investing resources also has a dividend calendar.

Folks can build their own calendars on spreadsheets. I'm more of a pen and paper guy so I buy large calendar books with monthly pages and add my stock's ex-dividend dates as well as those that are on my Watchlist.

Before adding a stock, I look at a stock's dividend history that several sites have recorded and I go to the source ... the stocks website for that investor information. 5 years back or more looking for no gaps or missed distributions. If so, I normally move on and forget that outfit. 

Stocks that have a modest increase in distributions over time is what I like to see.

Overall, heading into September, the markets (and most likely crypto) are waiting for an idea of what the next interest rate hike moves from the Feds will be like. A lower percentage or the same as the last hike.