Spring has really started over here and makes me spend more and more time outside. Luckily we have a garden so that we can still actually go outside during this lockdown. Lot’s of work still ahead of me and my fingers are getting greener and greener.

It often reminds me also about the psychology of dividend investors:

Dividend Growth Investing is like planting a tree. You wish you would have planted it 20 years ago.

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Having said that, enjoy today’s read of 5-bullet Sunday!

#Tax #EarningsRetrospective #Earnings #Dividends #Learnings #1990sBubbleStock #VivaItalia

5-Bullet Sunday is a weekly blog post with 5 topics that were on my mind this week related to Financial Independence and Dividend Growth Investing or something that just fed my curiosity. An overview of other earlier posts can be found here

🌟 Tax Declaration Time

This is the last weekend in Poland that we can declare our taxes, because the official ultimate submission date is the 31st of April. So I know what I’ll be doing this Sunday afternoon 😉

Actually, this is not always the easiest part of being a dividend growth investor in Europe, especially in Poland (Zloty instead of Euro). In Poland we differentiate between Income tax (dividends) and Capital Gains tax (stock/option sale), hence I need to calculate and separate two different streams of income.

Every year it takes me quite some time to prepare for it, because I need to literally go line item by line item and calculate my income in Polish Zlotys. As you might have noticed, I don’t own any Polish stock, so my income is mainly in EUR, USD and CHF 🤢. From the other side, I am just glad that I don’t have any equity anymore in the Netherlands on which I need to report income. That made it even harder!

Having said that, a lot of work as you can imagine and I find it also prone to error. Let’s cross fingers that all goes well, but like every year, I’m sure I’ll need to pay something!

PS: a longer more detailed post about this is on my todo-list

🌟 Retro last weeks European earnings

What went well

European Noblemen have been reporting very strong earnings under given circumstances. No wonder that they have so many years of dividend growth, because their businesses are typically just very defensive.

What can be improved

Companies are all cutting their guidance for the year. I find this a very interesting observation, because from one side I never looked into their guidance anyway. From the other side though: I just wonder why some of these stable companies are dropping their guidance. Their earnings seem stable.

So are they just using this opportunity to release some of the quarterly pressure on them? Forgive me for being a bit distrustful towards some of those boards. I just so hope that they use such opportunity to strengthen their balance sheet or seize opportunities for M&A or investments in R&D.

Having said that: I lack some transparency here. COVID-19 isn’t an excuse for everything!

What did I learn?

That I should make sure that none of my purchase orders are expired 😉. I had for few weeks a purchase order on Unilever outstanding on deGiro. Just the day before they reported earnings it got expired. This means that it missed the morning dip when it initially dropped 5%.

I know this sounds a bit stupid, because in the grand scheme of things those 2 percentages won’t make a real difference to my investment strategy. Therefore I’ll make it up tomorrow and will add those Unilever shares at the current price.

🌟 Upcoming Earnings

The following European companies will report their earnings:

• 27 April: Bayer AG
• 28 April: Novartis AG, BP Plc
• 29 April: Assa Abloy, Konecranes Oyj, GlaxoSmithKline plc
• 30 April: Royal Dutch Shell, Swisscom AG, BASF

Companies highlighted in bold are proud members of the Noble 30 ⚔

The following US companies will also report their earnings:

• 28 April: 3M, Alphabet, Merck & Co, Caterpillar, Starbucks, PepsiCo, UPS
• 29 April: Aflac, General Electric, Microsoft, Facebook, Qualcomm, Tesla
• 30 April: Amazon, Altria Group, Apple, McDonald’s, Visa
• 1 May: AbbVie, ExxonMobil, Clorox, Chevron,

Pick your battle! Some really great companies reporting this week. I’ll make sure to set some purchase order limits to pick up some of those on the dip, i.e. Novartis or PepsiCo.

I will also be really keeping a close eye on Starbucks. It’s a company that I would love to own, but I never bought it yet do to its lofty valuation. At the same time the Oil Majors are reporting out this week. I’m very curious to what they will do with their dividends as I’m quite invested in oil. 74 Years of Shell without a dividend cut is on the line. Let’s see!

🌟 Recommended Reads

A nice thing about Twitter is discovering other personal finance bloggers or getting new followers. I really love that, because people typically put a link in their biography to their own blog. This is actually one of the major ways in which I discover new and inspiring content.

As an example, just recently I discovered Project2035. I very much enjoyed his short but to the point post about a lessons learnt he had regarding sticking to his strategy.

I think we’ve all been there and it doesn’t matter how many books I have read about the great investors of our time (Buffet, Lynch or Dalio). It for sure protected me from making basic mistakes and develop my own strategy, but I mostly find myself learning from my personal mistakes and analyzing about why I made them. This is why I more and more believe that investing is some kind of art.

Another blog post that I enjoyed reading was from the Conservative Income Investor. I always love his historical view on stocks and the stock market and this week he wrote about a stock which resembles him of a 1990s bubble stock. That’s why such stock doesn’t belong in my portfolio allocation strategy. I need to see healthy profits which are partially shared in the form of dividends.

🌟 Recommended Video

Countries are starting more and more to think about slowly opening up again. Therefore I would like to share this very nice balcony sax performance, because it still gives me goosebumps.

It was published on the 19th of March, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in the North of Italy and I believe that it has made many of our Italian friends very proud, rightly so 💪

Let’s hope the best for getting this virus wiped-out. I’m so much looking forward for a European Championship in football. Viva I’Italia!

That was it for 5-Bullet Sunday, edition #17 😎

I am very much enjoying writing these posts. It allows me to think, touch on various topics and it requires me to stay on top of such things.

Thanks for being such a great audience 💪

Ciao! 🎷

Yours Truly,

European Dividend Growth Investor

Disclaimer

I’m not a certified financial planner/advisor nor a certified financial analyst nor an economist nor a CPA nor an accountant nor a lawyer. I’m not a finance professional through formal education. I’m a person who believes and takes pride in a sense of freedom, satisfaction, fulfillment and empowerment that I get from being financially competent and being conscious managing my personal money. The contents on this blog are for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial, accounting, or legal advice. I can’t promise that the information shared on my blog is appropriate for you or anyone else. By reading this blog, you agree to hold me harmless from any ramifications, financial or otherwise, that occur to you as a result of acting on information provided on this blog.