Author: Everyday-Freethought

Here is the dividend income report for April, 2024.

The monthly dividend income came out to $302.91. The yearly income total for 2024 through the end of the month was $2767.61.

The income for April, 2023 was $206.73, and the yearly income for 2023 through the end of April was $2591.69.

The twelve-month moving average broke $1,100 for the fifth time.

Since I am behind, I will discuss a few changes I am making and thinking about making to my portfolio.

I have bought shares in XDTE, the Roundhill S&P 500 0DTE Covered Call Strategy ETF (Yahoo page here, Roundhill page here). It is similar to XYLD, the Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF (Yahoo Finance page here, GlobalX page here). I have been looking into option ETFs to possibly replace XYLD. A lot of people are concerned about return of capital and that a lot of option ETFs do not appreciate in price along with their underlying index (or the index underlying their index, since XYLD does not follow the S&P directly). I have done some reading and seen a few interviews with ETF managers on YouTube. I plan on writing more about this subject in the future.

For now I will keep XDTE and XYLD. XDTE pays weekly and has a higher expense ratio. Hopefully the more frequent dividends will make up for the higher expenses. XDTE is actively managed, and only has $27 million under management with an expense ratio of 0.95%. XYLD is passively managed, has $2.8 billion under management, and has an expense ratio of 0.60%. Another passive fund from GlobalX (QYLD) has $8.2 billion assets, and they just increased the expense ratio to 0.61%. XDTE is actively managed and has about 0.96428% of the assets as XYLD. XDTE is a newer fund. I predict that as it gets more assets its expense ratio will come down. I have a few more interviews with GlobalX managers to watch, but given how much they charge they seem expensive.

Together these two funds make up about 1.5% of my total assets.

I have also sold all my shares of SDY, the SPDR S&P Dividend ETF (State Street page here, Yahoo Finance page here). As soon as the cash is all settled, I will buy SCHD, the Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF (Schwab page here, Yahoo Finance page here).

I am thinking about replacing a couple of my other funds. I might replace WDIV (SPDR S&P Global Dividend ETF; Yahoo Finance page here, State Street Page here) with SCHY (Schwab International Dividend Equity ETF; Schwab page here, Yahoo Finance page here). Here is a table comparing the two, using information on the fund pages:

SCHY has a lower expense ratio, and a better yield.

Here is the country breakdown for SCHY (I think this adds up to 82.09%):

Here is the country breakdown for WDIV (this does add up to 100%):

SCHY does not have any money in the United States, while WDIV has 24.24% in the United States. I have plenty of other funds invested in the USA. SCHY has 14.35% outside of Western/Eurocentric countries, while WDIV has 28.67% of its assets outside the west. I might instead go with a mix of the two.

Schwab also has a real estate ETF (SCHH; Schwab U.S. REIT ETF). I have RWR (SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF). RWR has a higher expense ratio than SCHH, but it also has a higher yield. The difference in expenses is less than the difference in yield.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each April from the beginning of my records through 2024:

Here are the securities and the income amounts for April, 2024:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $232.54
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $21.99
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $48.28

There is no good place to look at your phone.

Painting ‘Jacob Wrestling with the Angel’ by Alexandre-Louis Leloir (1843-1884); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for March, 2024.

The monthly dividend income came out to $2092.22. The yearly income total for 2024 through the end of the month was $2464.80.

The income for March, 2023 was $2089.76, and the yearly income for 2023 through the end of March was $2384.96.

The twelve-month moving average broke $1,100 for the fourth time.

I have a couple of topics on the back-burner that I am working on. I want to get this report out since I am falling behind.

One thing I am thinking about is replacing the SPDR S&P Dividend ETF (SDY, State Street page here, Yahoo!Finance page here) with the Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF (SCHD, Schwab page here, Yahoo!Finance page here). It has more assets ($55.27B vs. $20.35B), a lower expense ratio (0.06% vs. 0.35%), and a higher yield (3.40% vs. 2.53%). It has fewer stocks (103 vs. 135; I thought SDY had more). I will have to look at the index; SCHD uses the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100™ Index, while SDY uses the S&P® High Yield Dividend Aristocrats™. I am not as familiar with it SCHD’s index. SCHD recently had its yearly reset, so there are a lot of videos on YouTube explaining it.

The Dividend Aristocrats are drawn from the S&P Composite 1500, so they are going to only have companies that are making a profit. I will have to look into the criteria of SCHD. But it looks like in the long run it might be more money. I know some Bogleheads would say you should just buy the market, but as far as I am concerned, companies that do not pay dividends are dead weight. It does not have some of the low-yielding big tech firms with low yields as their largest holdings, like Apple or Microsoft. Neither does SDY, but there are a few other dividend ETFs that do. One issue is that the biggest holdings of SCHD can be up to 4% of the portfolio. I will look at the index methodology. Most indices limit how big its biggest holding can be.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each March from the beginning of my records through 2024:

Here are the securities and the income amounts for March, 2024:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $216.91
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $20.46
• SPDR S&P Dividend ETF: $810.11
• SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF: $88.30
• SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF: $175.81
• SPDR S&P Global Dividend ETF: $469.08
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $45.30
• Vanguard Utilities ETF: $266.25

“Who can spin the most plates in their head” is a stupid game to play.

Painting ‘Pallas Athene Visits Invidia’ by Karel Dujardin (1626 – 1678); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for February, 2024.

The monthly dividend income came out to $289.26. The yearly income total for 2024 through the end of the month was $372.58.

The income for February, 2023 was $196.67, and the yearly income for 2023 through the end of February was $295.58.

2023 beat 2022, while so far 2024 is doing better against 2023 than it was last month. I added money to my Roth IRA, but I have not bought any new shares outside of reinvesting dividends since June of 2022. That was also the last month my twelve-month moving average was less that $1,000. My last trade before that was selling RLI in April of 2022.

The twelve-month moving average broke $1,100 for the third time.

In other news, grift-o-currency just will not die. I supposed I should not be shocked that people are still into this, but I am. If you want a store of value, you have gold. Grift-o-currency uses a lot of energy. My only guess is that grift-o proponents are so angry and bitter they just want to watch the world burn. Some people are saying that buttcoin is up because of the approval of buttcoin ETFs. Coin-grifters think this is a sign of grift-o’s success and value.

Which is funny, because for years coin-grifters were saying that grift-o doesn’t need the real financial system (what they call the “fiat”, “centralized” or “traditional” finance). You can be your own bank with grift-o (and look for your hard drive in a landfill if you make a mistake). Now, much like conservatives who love government money for themselves, they think it’s great that the real financial system is selling grift-o ETFs. ETFs themselves are a product of the real financial system. Coin grifters might think they are taking over. I think that the ETF providers are just providing a product they think will sell. ETFs open and close all the time. If grift-o ETFs stay open, it will be because the providers make money on them, not because they are stupid enough to believe any of this garbage. As Molly White pointed out, the original point of grift-o was to not involve a powerful financial institution like BlackRock. The coin-grifters are all frauds for celebrating this. It is proof that all they care about is finding someone to hold the bag.

Many anti-grift-o people feel that grift-o ETFs will lead to the ETF providers or perhaps the whole financial system collapsing. I do not think this will happen. Each fund is a separate legal and financial entity.

And I am not too sure it will make the dent that coin-grifters are hoping. Here are the 22 largest grift-o-currency ETFs listed at ETF DB, data current as of 2024-05-24 1:01 EDT:

If you do not feel like adding it all up, the total assets comes out to $63.334 billion. BlackRock alone has $2.831 trillion in assets. $63.334B is about 2.25% of 2.831T. I do not think grift-o currency will take over the world. It looks like one of those is an ETF that shorts buttcoin, so perhaps that one should be subtracted. Here are the issuers of the above ETFs, with their grift-o assets, total assets, and grift-o as a percent of their total. I have also included State Street and Vanguard, since they are the two largest ETF providers after BlackRock (which sells ETFs under the “iShares” brand). I am surprised that Fidelity has such a high percent of its ETF assets in grift-o.

For one of the ARK funds, ARK Investment Management is a sub-sub-advisor.

I have always felt that if grift-o stays around, it will not replace the big banks, but instead be absorbed and co-opted by them.

It seems like some coin grifters are still true-believing, Fed-hating glibertarians. But it looks like a lot are just speculating. I hear a lot of “I bought some coin at X, and I sold it at Y.” It would be cheaper to have a 24/7 web cam on people rolling dice or flipping actual coins and just placing bets on that. At least gold has industrial uses, lack of decay, and 5,000 years of history on its side. Grift-o-currency is gold nuttery without the good arguments, but it kept the crazy people and found a way to make it as expensive as possible.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each February from the beginning of my records through 2024:

Here are the securities and the income amounts for February, 2024:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $226.50
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $20.62
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $42.14

Being able to drop a topic is an underrated skill.

Data from ETFDB assumed to be in public domain; valid on 2024-05-24. Painting ‘Touch’ by Antonio Giarola (1597 – 1674); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for January, 2024.

The monthly dividend income came out to $83.22. The yearly income total for 2024 through the end of the month was $83.22.

The income for January, 2023 was $98.53, and the yearly income for 2023 through the end of January was $98.53.

2023 beat 2022, while so far 2024 is not doing as well against 2023.

The twelve-month moving average broke $1,100 for the second time. Even before taxes that would barely cover my rent.

One thing that happened in the past few months is that Snakebook started paying a dividend. In my 2020-02 income report, I referenced a post on the blog Dividend Growth Investor in which the author suggested IVV (or TMI) as a base for DGI since the S&P 500 as a whole has increased dividends for at least 10 years. In general that is a good blog, but going with a general index fund is a bad idea for DGI. Just go with an ETF that only includes dividend paying stocks, ideally DGI stocks. Any stock that does not pay a dividend is not worth your time. (And before anyone yacks about share buybacks, I think you should only look at investments that put actual cash into your account, not potential cash later because you might be able to sell it for more at some point.) The author also predicted that some of the big tech firms that were not paying dividends (like Screw-gle, Facecrook or Scamazon) might start. I predicted they would not. At least in the case of Facecrook I was wrong.

Apple and Microsoviet have been paying dividends, and increasing them for at least a decade, so they are DGI stocks. They are profitable, but there is a downside. They are expensive and have high P/E ratios, therefore they have low percentage yields. Having a lot of expensive tech stocks paying dividends will drag down the overall yield of many indices.

Here is a table with some info about a few big tech stocks that pay dividends. I also included NVIDIA; it is not a DGI stock, but I was not aware until recently that they paid dividends. It has been frozen for a few years, and it not that much given how much NVIDIA has gone up. Snakebook just started paying a dividend, so no sites have calculated their payout ration yet.

Per the latest Dividend Radar spreadsheet, the median yield for the 729 stocks in the quasi-index is 2.58%, ranging from 0.10% for HEICO to 12.84% for Arbor Realty Trust. Maybe I will add that stat to the year-end report.

I remember when I started getting into DGI. A lot of people thought I was crazy for not wanting any Crapple. They thought I should own it because they were iDrones who loved their iPhones. Granted, they never said that, but if you kept them talking, that was pretty much it. They thought I should ignore stocks that actually produce cash and bet my retirement on a company whose products I have no interest in because people other than me just looooove their shiny object. Most of these Apple fanboys could not grasp the concept of dividends. They just loved their iPhones. Then in 2012 Crapple started paying a dividend, and people who a year before literally could not grasp the concept of dividends suddenly were experts. In their minds nobody paid dividends until Crapple did.

I really do not like Apple users. They rightly mock Microsoft fanboys who think something does not happen unless MS does it, but Apple fanboys turn around and do the exact same thing. Also: why do Apple users never have chargers? Every time I go to a tech meetup, it seems like there is at least one Apple user who needs to charge their laptop and does not have their charger.

And if you think people are not irrational about stocks anymore, look at Messla. It was a hot stock while losing money for years. It hit a high of about $400 in 2021-11 (per the Yahoo! Finance chart at the time of this writing), and is now around $180. Maybe a lot of shorts got hosed, but so did some true believers. We should go back to the days when stock buybacks were illegal, and people bought stocks for the dividends that were paid out from cash flows. So much insanity seems to come from people’s obsession with capital gains, and the games that result from that.

The author at Dividend Growth Investor also claims to have invented the concept of the Dividend Kings in 2010. DK are companies that have increased their dividends for at least 50 years. There does not seem to be an offical page or index for the DK, so they might be the actual person who came up with it.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each January from the beginning of my records through 2024:

Here are the securities and the income amounts for January, 2024:

• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $39.84
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $43.48

I don’t have enough money to be a sugar daddy, but unfortunately there is not a big market for salty daddies.

Painting Le sacrifice d’Iphigénie by Gabriel-François Doyen (1726-1806); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain.