Investment update in September 2020

With countries all over Europe taking measures to slow down the second wave markets are not responding well. While the drop is nowhere near the first wave right now, we can clearly see the first drop since the first wave passed. There is not much to do about it in the short run except to wait it out.

On Peer to peer investments Crowdestor has opened a secondary market, that hopefully will speed up my exit. More about Crowdestor bellow.

Also Belgium has imposed another lockdown. Lots of sports I did are now no longer allowed. That includes swimming, fitness, spinning and tennis. On top of that bars, restaurants and all non-essential shops are closed. Not to mention cultural venues, fun parks and zoos also should remain closed. What hasn’t happened yet is a lockdown where we are limited in our movement. Belgium has the 2nd highest number of intensive care beds per head of the population in Europe and even our hospitals are getting overrun. I am just wondering how other countries do this without going into lockdown. One thing I am worried about is all the debt we are taking up. One day we will need to pay those back with taxes.

I can still mountainbike and run fortunately., but its not easy to fill the time. You can see people hamster again in the supermarkets, something that I will not be doing. I need fresh food and can’t survive a month on canned food. Hamstering is an automatic reaction people have when they see empty shelves. Then they automatically want to buy more. To be honest if I lived in a house with enough storage space I would have already had some supply of long lasting food, but on an apartment its not worth it for me to use up space to store food.

Alright enough stuff about my life lets go and check how much my portfolio dropped or increased.

My Portfolio

My Portfolio has dropped to 67009 EUR (-1260) even though I invested an additional 1000 EUR, so it just shows how big the drop was this month.

Lets look into more detail for each of these investment types shall we.

ETFs

The stock market continues to drop giving me a total loss of -2227 EUR since I started with the bellow stocks (January this year).

At this point I am really happy I limited my portfolio to just two ETFs, it makes it so much easier to track! And I keep finding it very easy to invest with DEGIRO, I am really happy I chose DEGIRO as broker!

SPDR MSCI World UCITS ETF (SWRD)

My World ETF has made a drop this month unfortunately putting me at a loss of -5.49% since inception.

ISHARES CORE MSCI Emerging Markets IMI UCITS ETF

With a 42 EUR win this month this ETF actually went up slightly

Peer to Peer

I am left with only 5 peer to peer investments: 2 active peer to peer investments (Crowdestor and TFGCrowd), 1 with 100% of the funds in recovery (Mintos) and 2 where I am trying to recover some funds trough legal action.

I only show withdrawals here. So far I withdrew about 55% (+6%) of the funds I had invested in peer to peer.

CrowdEstor

• Crowestor has more and more delays this month. I normally had 3 projects that had to pay principal this month and none of them came trough.
• The good news for me is that a secondary market was introduced. I put my projects on the market at 5-10% discount and was lucky enough to sell a little over 30% of my investments so far. I will keep trying to sell more, but projects that are 90 days late are hard to sell of course.

Grupeer

No progress at all from Grupeers side this month. Grupeer created a recovery firm but it seems after one month the bank account of this respectable recovery firm is not yet approved.

My main method to recover funds is legal action. I can say that its moving but very slowly. There is updates but I am not allowed to post them unfortunately.

Kuetzal

I am in a legal procedure with Kuetzal and cannot comment on any non-public information, I wanted to share more this month but I still can’t. I am currently counting on it that I can recover at least 50%.

Mintos

Mintos now allows you to see where they money in recovery is stuck. To my surprise about 200 EUR was also stuck in Monego. The rest is stuck in Capital Service. No progress here unfortunately. To be honest I am strongly considering to write off this investment. While I think I can recover the 200 EUR in Monego, I am not sure at all about Capital Service.

TFGCrowd

I still have 88 EUR in TFGCrowd because of a failed project. Normally the buy back should kick in this month and I should be getting the money back.

Startups

I still have now 3200 EUR in startups invested, I have every intention to withdraw this whenever possible.

Retirement funds

I decided not to update my retirement funds all the time since for most of the funds I get an update just once a year, so I will update it also just once a year. This is from end of 2019. I will update it again in December 2020.

Wins / losses this month

• My ETF Portfolio made a small 1000 EUR loss.
• Slowly but certainly I am moving out of peer to peer
• All the triathlons I wanted to participate in got canceled I need to move this goal to next year.

What is next?

• My secret project is still ongoing

I will also post a savings rate update soon! Subscribe and make sure you don’t miss any of my monthly portfolio updates!