Welcome back to another 5-Bullet Sunday!

I hope you all enjoyed the last leg of your holiday break or enjoyed the first days back at work (I’m sure many of you had a slow start 😉)

I started working already and I must say that I enjoyed it. It’s just great to have a job that you like, because it keeps the energy going.

Though, that’s work. After work I love to think and talk about investing. Hence, every week I’m looking forward again to Sunday so that I can share with you my 5-bullets of the week.

Enjoy the read with your favorite ☕

Content Published this week:

• 4 interesting upcoming European Dividend Announcements – Dividend Talk – #30 (YouTube | Spotify | or your other favorite platform accessible via Anchor)
• How to retire early with Dividend Stocks (YouTube – see also below)

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 earlier posts can be found here

🌟 LNG is on 🔥

I have been bullish on Liquid Natural Gas for a very long time, but so far it has been a suckers game for me regarding investments.

My thesis is simple: we can’t switch off “dirty” energy sources over night, because they provide a certain stability which natural resources like sun and wind can’t provide yet.

LNG is one of the cleanest forms of energy which we pull from our earth. Therefore I really think that LNG is the ideal scalable transition energy in the upcoming decades.

The Natural Gas prices have gone nowhere though over the last 5 years and it really crashed with the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020

Let’s see how it develops from here. My experience is mixed with IEA’s predictions, especially related to their Oil Demand forecasts.

Having said that, I read a nice short article on Dutch website Nu.nl about gas and it referred to the cold winter in Spain. It then went on to describe how important Spain is as a Liquid Natural Gas hub to Europe.

In the article it refers to LNG sources from Qatar and Nigeria and the fact that Spain has 6 gas terminals and a 7th under construction. And guess who’s shipping LNG from Qatar?

Right, Royal Dutch Shell.

And guess who’s owning LNG terminals in Spain?

Right, Enagas SA (check out my analysis).

I own stakes in both of them and I truly believe that LNG is one of the best bet on the energy transition. Gas often acts as a replacement for coal and it is a major provider of electricity production and acts as the key source of heat.

The exuberant share price and multiple appreciations won’t be part of this. This is reserved for the Solar and Wind suppliers being hyped in the slipstream of the Electrical Vehicle (EV) investment case.

But what I do believe is that LNG will provide decent and excellent cash flows for those two companies in my portfolio. Dividends seem safe, especially after the great dividend reset from Royal Dutch Shell.

🌟 European Dividend Stock Calendar

It’s hard to find reliable dividend data for European stocks and it also hard to find a single source of reliable financial calendar information.

Therefore I end up crawling through many investor relations pages at the beginning of the year. It means literally data scraping those sites and manually copying the information into my gSheet.

I personally need this information, because it allows me to be alert on the events related to the stocks I own. Checking those companies every day makes no sense and it would be a waste of time. I invest for the long-term, not the daily price action.

Hence, to stay focused I need to know what the major events are throughout the year. And based on my experience they can be split into 3 categories:

• Financial Results (Annual & Quarterly)
• Major Investor Conferences (Often leads to news in the investment community)
• Dividend Announcements and payment information

Those ~10 events per year allow me to maintain a large portfolio of up to 40 companies. Believe, me that’s already stretching and double the amount of events would literally drive me nuts!

Having said all of this, what I wanted to let you know that I have been experimenting this month with a dividend stock calendar on this blog. You might actually already see few event dates in the right sidebar (desktop) or if you scroll a bit further down below this post (mobile).

As part of the experiment I also tried to collect all the January information from US Dividend Aristocrats. This has taught me that it was a lot of work and also not adding too much value, because the basic information of the next upcoming dividend is also available in the Dividend Champions list.

Hence, I will keep the dividend stock calendar, but only focused on European companies and those few US companies that I own or which I desire to own as part of my allocation strategy.

This way the information is not only hidden in my private gSheet, but also accessible to you in a user friendly manner.

So far, it contains the January data of European companies and I am working on having the February and remaining dates for 2021 published in a manner of days.

I hope you enjoy it and if you would like to participate in some data scraping, then let me know. Even better, if you know how to data scrape and automate this process, then definitely reach out to me as well. That would be the ideal state for me: full automation to have reliable European dividend stock calendar data.

Let me know what you think about and if you find this useful.

Browse the calendar with initial January test data here.

🌟 Goal-setting for 2021

I’ve been working on my goals a bit for this year and I am splitting those goals into 3 categories:

• Personal Goals, i.e. health, family and finance related
• Content Creation goals, i.e. this Blog, Social Media and YouTube
• Work related goals, i.e. what’s the main impact I would like to make to the company that I work for?

To be honest, I am bit struggling with it, especially the first one. I guess I’m just lacking some creativity, especially on the first bullet.

The thing is, last year I really failed on the sporting goals. I miss sporting, but at the same time this Covid-19 situation will probably stay around for another 6 months. I’m not a fan of individual sports, so I am really struggling with this one.

Having said that, a post about my goals for 2021 will come a bit later and towards the end of January. Therefore I also wanted to ask you what your goals are for 2021? Would you mind sharing some with me?

It could really inspire me and trigger my creativity.

🌟 Recommended Reads

Richard Whitehead recommended to me this morning to read a Financial Times article about the UK bringing back Swiss stock trading into London. It’s very interesting to observe what’s happening with the Brexit and how it will define the competition with EU stock exchanges in the years to come. Thanks for sharing Richard!

It’s a little bit in line with the LNG bullet. Europe’s Eurostat just released another nice short article about the share of electricity from renewable sources. I think this is interesting for the renewable fans among us. I was really surprised to see that Austria and Portugal were so high up in the list 👍.

Last but not least, I wanted to share with you the December results of both Engineer My Freedom (EMF) and Fight to Fire. EMF is still in the earlier stages of his journey, but his dividend income figures are really growing nicely (check here). Fight To Fire realized a whopping 39.13% savings rate, that’s just amazing 💪 (read here)

🌟 Recommended Video

This time I’m sharing my own video which I published this week. I wanted to let you know that I’m creating a few videos as part of a beginners series for people that are new to dividend investing.

I’m running this blog for a year now and I noticed that I have some gaps in my articles about topics that are typical to starting investors, i.e.: when to sell, how to screen for stocks, etc…

These gaps have become apparent because of the questions that I receive from you via email or social media. Hence, one of my goals is to fill the gaps in the upcoming quarter and I believe that I can do this best via blog post articles supported by videos on YouTube.

The videos allow me to also show you how I do certain things which may clarify it a bit more than just written text. I believe this should be helpful for you.

Having said that, I will try to “backdate” those articles so that it doesn’t trigger an email to the email list, because I assume that half of you would not be so interested in these articles as it’s common knowledge for the more experienced dividend investors. I don’t want to spam you 😉

If not, just let me know and I will reconsider, because these are just my assumptions.

Let me also know what you think about the below video and just know that I’m always open for feedback!

That’s it for the this week! I hope that you enjoyed this week’s 5-Bullet Sunday 🙏

As always, have a lovely week ahead!

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.