It was a nice week again and time flies when I’m having fun! I don’t know how it is for you, but I really love the first quarter of the year. So many great companies are reporting their Full Year earnings and the European companies usually announce their dividend hikes. At the same time it means that my coffee consumption literally increased by 50% (from 2 to 3 a day), so I might need to do some caffeine detoxing at the start of March 😉

Having said that, I hope you enjoy today’s 5-Bullet Sunday 👌

Content created this week:

• Unilever Share Price Drop – Is this a buying opportunity?
• Ep #35 | Earnings Season Continued | $PEP $CSCO $KO $HEIA $OR $RELX $HD
  (YouTube | Anchor.fm | Apple Podcasts | Spotify)

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

🌟 The European Big Lie

Where America has coined the so-called election frauds claimed by Trumpists as the “Big Lie”, in Europe we have our own version with Brexit.

I guess the main difference is that Brexit feels already as a thing from the past for us who are living in continental Europe, whereas Americans are still in the middle of it.

However, this is definitely not the case for people that are on the wrong side of Brexit.

I recently read about the UK fishermen who have seen their business being devastated by having stepped out of the European Union.

Their Big Lie was the fact that they would get control back over their own waters. Firstly, it will still take some time to get full control back, because that’s a gradual process. However, the real issue is that they underestimated who their customers were when deciding to vote to Leave.

Seemingly their main customers are people from within the European Union and now the same EU rules apply to UK fishermen as to any fishermen from outside of the European Union.

And this is a big problem for them. “Live bivalve mollusks” (i.e. mussels, oysters, scallops, cockles and clams) can only be imported from non-EU member states without treatment if they originate from waters of the highest quality.

And as you can guess already, these waters are not of the highest quality and it has closed off many exports of those mollusks since Brexit took full effect.

I just can’t think about another term than Economic Darwinism when thinking about the UK fishermen.

My only hope is that the regulators in the European Union show some solidarism and loosen up a bit to get them out of their suffering. There’s no fun in seeing our European fishermen friends bleed into economic death.

What did I learn from this?

Do Your Own Homework.

This doesn’t only apply to your dividend growth portfolio, because before you know it you are caught up in the next Big Lie….

🌟 The Earnings Season Continuum

Week 3 of earnings season is behind us and I would definitely recommend to listen to our latest podcast (YouTube | Spotify). Dividend Wave joined us and we discuss our highlights of the week regarding the reported earnings.

Hence, you hear us talking about PepsiCo ($PEP), Cisco ($CSCO), Coca-Cola ($KO), Heineken ($HEIA), RelX ($RELX) and L’Oreal ($OR).

Our podcast can be lengthy at times, so if you would like to go straight to the earnings, then start at minute 16:00. It takes us 24 minutes to discuss these companies.

On another note, earnings season is definitely not over yet! Just look at some of the companies reporting their earnings in the upcoming week.

This is an important week for my portfolio, because I own quite large positions in Ahold Delhaize and Danone.

I’m especially very curious about Danone’s upcoming dividend announcement. I assume that we will see a dividend freeze as the company is trying to reorganize itself. That’s OK for me, because it still spots an almost 4% yield and the company shows good value.

At the same time I’m also very curious about NN Group and Allianz. I touched on them in one of my YouTube videos from not too long ago.

What is the stock you are most eagerly looking forward to?

🌟 Chart of the week

Corné van Zeijl shared a very interesting chart this week on Twitter. The chart below shows the European sectors over the last 10 years with and without dividend being considered.

The interesting fact is that dividends accounted for approximately 55% of the Total Return. This is really a lot and it confirms the power of investing for dividends and dividend reinvesting.

It’s not only high growth tech stocks that can make you rich.

🌟 Recommended Reads

Someone on Twitter shared this horrible story last week. A youngster killed himself the other day after thinking that he had put his family in “unrecoverable” financial trouble. The unfortunate thing is that it was based on incorrect information provided by the Robin Hood broker. I found the article very touching and I can’t imagine the trouble the family is going through right now. Not sure if the person had mental health problems.

On a bit of a lighter note, I enjoyed reading the following two articles from our fellow bloggers:

Engineer my Freedom wrote an article about Cisco’s earnings results. Why did the stock go down and what to think of Cisco? It surely has an interesting yield, so it begs the question whether now is the right time to buy the stock.

Fight to Fire shared his story about how he jumped on the bandwagon by investing in GameStop. Good for him, because it was a profitable endeavor 👌 It’s interesting to see how different (dividend) investors are also using a bit of their money for some speculative plays and how things work out.

🌟 Recommended Video

Today I wanted to share with you a “throw-back” Sunday video. Just imagine how investing in stocks would look like without the internet. Hence, I found watching this video very interesting.

My main take away: one thing that didn’t change is that information is key.

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.