It's been a month since I began the $50 per pay check starter Dividend stock portfolio with $200 for fun and profit.
This Thursday, 7/18/19, as on 7/3/19, I sent another $50 over to M1 Financial to buy additional fractional shares of the 100 mostly dividend growth stocks in the portfolio.
As of market close on 7/18/19, the portfolio value is $295.99 and the cash in the account is $3.11, for a total account value of $299.10. So far the account has earned $0.34 in dividends and lost $0.90 in total due to market fluctuations.
I'm still not sure why there is any cash in the account, but I suspect it hasn't been invested because M1's algorithms were unable to use that money and keep each stock at roughly 1% of the portfolio. I wonder how high this amount will reach before it is invested.
The SPY ETF (tracking the S&P 500) closed at $298.83 on 7/18/19. Investing $50 into it at this price would have bought an additional 0.16732 shares, bringing the total shares to 1.015763 in our SPY benchmark. The benchmark investment value would thus be $303.54 as of 7/18/19.
Date | Additional Investment | Running Total Investment | Dividend Portfolio Account Value | Additional Benchmark SPY Shares | Running Total Benchmark SPY Shares | SPY Closing Share Price | Benchmark SPY Value | Dividend Portfolio VS Benchmark |
6/24/19 | $200.00 | $200.00 | $200.00 | 0.681107 | 0.681107 | $293.64 | $200.00 | 0.000% |
7/3/19 | $50.00 | $250.00 | $252.22 | 0.167336 | 0.848443 | $298.80 | $253.51 | -0.511% |
7/18/19 | $50.00 | $300.00 | $299.10 | 0.167320 | 1.015763 | $298.83 | $303.54 | -1.463% |
Part of this underperformance can be attributed to some ex-dividend dates that happened amount the 100 stocks in the dividend portfolio where the dividends haven't been paid out yet, and the accumulation of dividends in the S&P 500 ETFs (the next ex-dividend date is in around two months). This difference should even out and go into the portfolio's favor as its dividend yield is 3.681%, compared to SPY's 1.83%.
Another difference is that the S&P is market cap weighted. The performance of the largest companies among its constituents affects its performance to a larger extent than the dividend portfolio's, which is equal weighted. Also, the dividend portfolio doesn't hold many of the largest S&P stocks either because they don't pay a dividend or their dividend yield was too low at the time the portfolio was constructed. So, for example, the dividend portfolio doesn't have the top five stocks in the S&P: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway. It also has smaller stocks as well as international stocks, both of which aren't in the S&P 500.
Below is a collage of screenshots of the dividend portfolio holdings as of market close 7/19/19 (screenshots done on Saturday 7/20/19). It appears that M1 doesn't have an export feature yet (or I can't find it).
