Here is my portfolio from February 10, 2017, right when my portfolio, completely chosen from MagicFormulaInvesting.com, included 30 stocks:
On that date the State Street Global Advisors S&P 500 ETF (SPY) closed at 231.51 and my portfolio was worth just over $60,000. I’ll use the SPY as my benchmark for comparison against my portfolio’s performance in the years to come. Why? If my portfolio is not beating this common investment after five years, I’ll consider this experiment a failure because I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by simply buying a low-cost index fund or ETF.
One thing that should jump out of the spreadsheet at you is Cisco Systems. How could I have 66.554 shares? This is part of my learning curve! My portfolio is in my Vanguard account, which defaults to automatic dividend investments. This is fine for the Vanguard funds I’m invested in, but not for my Magic Formula Portfolio. I simply never considered that Vanguard would automatically re-invest dividends for individual stocks. Luckily they don’t charge commissions for this. But going forward I don’t want these dividends to be re-invested in current investments. Any dividends should feed my next Magic Formula investment. This means that money will be sitting in the pot for a little while until it can be invested. This situation will be discussed in future posts. Vanguard makes it easy to selectively turn automatic dividend re-investment on or off for any investment, so I turned these all off after I realized what was happening.