2022-07 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for July, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $213.12. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $5916.53

The income for July, 2021 was $199.25, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of July was $4861.65.

It is looking more and more like I will be leaving my current employer at the end of the month. They do not have any positions in the technologies that I am interested in. I have tried studying other things on my own, but things get in the way, or I lose energy, or something happens. Getting a new job is a job. I already have one. I do not want another.

So I will probably be rolling over my Roth 401K into my Roth IRA. This will increase my dividend income substantially. Granted, it will also decrease my savings. I do not know how bad inflation will be or how long it will take to get a new job. But I am not jumping off a cliff unprepared.

I will sell what I have in my regular IRA and buy the same amount of shares of those ETFs in my Roth IRA. I think I will then use my regular IRA for REITs and individual stocks, or perhaps ETFs that I would not ordinarily buy (like ETFs specific to a country or industry). But no corrupt-o-currency.

The big news in corrupt-o-currency and buttcoin is that Michal Saylor is resigning as CEO of MicroStrategy. He founded MSTR in 1989. Allegedly their main business is business intelligence and analytics software. In 2020, he decided that MSTR should stop holding cash, and instead put its money into buttcoin. MSTR is the largest known corporate holder of buttcoin. (Or should I call it bitcon?)

I have never heard of MSTR until Saylor got into bitcon. Then it seemed like all he ever talks about is bitcon. There several videos on the MSTR Youtube channel about bitcon. He tweeted today that “Since @MicroStrategy adopted a #Bitcoin Strategy, its enterprise value is up +730% (+$5 billion) and $MSTR is up +123%. Performance of BTC is +94%, S&P 500 +23%, Nasdaq +13%, Gold -13%, Bonds -14%, Silver -29%. GOOG +54%, AAPL +43%, MSFT +34%, AMZN -14%, META -39%, NFLX -53%.” What does that have to do with BI and analytics? Is a potential client going to say, “Well, your competitors’ software products actually give us more useful information than yours, but since you are in bitcon, we will sign with you”?

I did look at some of their quarterly reports. For the past several quarters they had impairment charges for bitcon. I have not looked at every earnings presentation ever, but I have seen quite a few. Other firms do not talk as much about their cash holdings as MSTR talks about bitcon. Are these guys interested in BI software? If I were looking for BI software, I would look for a vendor that just talks about that. Do not go off-topic. And if you are talking about bitcon, then you really are an idiot.

Saylor’s twitter profile pic shows lasers coming out of his eyes. Is this guy mentally ill? Note to corrupt-o-currency advocates: If this was all meant as a big joke, this all got old before it ever got funny.

When Twitter came out, it seemed totally pointless. Then after a couple of years people started posting links to new pages on their websites, their latest YouTube videos, and live tweeting events. I think it is fair to say that we are past the time that bitcon advocates can get away with telling us bitcon or corrupt-o-currency or blockchump will change the world. Very few people are using it for purchases. Why would I want to use bitcon to buy things? I like doing everything in one currency. I am not dealing with people in other countries. Why make my life more complicated? It is not a store of value. Things are looking worse in general, and bitcon is about a third of what it was 9 months ago (it reached an adjusted close of $67,566.83 on 2021-11-08; it’s adjusted close on 2022-08-02 was $22,978.12). Farmland is also described as a “store of value“, and it is going up; it also produces an income stream. A lot of articles about the different coins use terms like “support” and “resistance”, just like technical analysis for stocks. I thought bitcon was supposed to be something new and different, but it’s just another tradable instrument. We already have plenty of those.

The bitcon paper came out in 2009. That was 13 years ago. Thirteen years is a significant portion of the human lifespan. We have been hearing “any day now” for a long time. Enough was enough a long time ago. We get it. You are all misanthropes. Get over yourselves.

I think corrupt-o-currency fanbois are like glibertarians. Glibertarians say they want less government; what they really want is to be in charge. Bitcon fanbois are upset they aren’t calling the shots.

I find it odd that bitcon fanbois rant about “fiat” currencies, yet they are all-in on an asset that some random person (whose identity has never been verified) just made up. The only reason that bitcon has “digital scarcity” is just because everyone has agreed to abide by an anonymous white paper. There is really nothing objective about any of this.

And before any fanboi tells me that I don’t get it and I should read this or listen to that: Do not bother. I do not have to understand this. I didn’t ask for it.

I did look at the bitcon paper. I didn’t get past the first page. It said that if we could get rid of intermediaries, we could have non-reversible transactions and we would all save money. There are at least two problems here. Non-reversible transactions is only a good thing if you are a scammer. Most people do not understand finance or technology. A no-recourse financial system would be a disaster. The other issue is that bitcon is not less expensive. Compare the number of transactions Visa does versus the bitcon network.

In other news, I saw an article that more people are looking at bonds and dividend stocks and ETFs. Will they stick with dividends when things turn around? Or will they be tempted once again by the sweet siren song of capital gains?

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each July from 2011 through 2022:

Here are the securities and the income amounts for July, 2022:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $151.73
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $161.52
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $213.12

Big Jim says there is nothing wrong with being serious in a world full of problems.

“Study for Moses and the Burning Bush” by Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937); image from Smithsonian Institute, allowed under public domain.

Note: Adjusted close prices were taken from Yahoo Finance, and were valid on 2022-08-29; they may change in the future.