Portfolio Cleanup – Cuts & Additions. 2 Less Holdings

Portfolio Cleanup – Cuts & Additions

Hey

This month, I decided to do a little bit of house keeping and clean up the portfolio a bit. There were certain holdings I have had for a long time that I have always thought of tossing, but didn’t want to book a loss. This month I decided to take the loss and just move forward. Short term its unfortunate, but I feel in the long term it’s going to a better move/Portfolio.

Sales

Extendicare

First on the sale list is Extendicare. This was one of our original holdings from way back, and just like most of those it needed to be cut. I think I bought it because of its monthly high yield and lack of healthcare stocks in Canada. I liked the idea of long-term care, retirement living and home health care.

Then covid hit…. Outbreaks at homes like theirs blew up (exe did pretty good in this regard though) and then things started getting political… Why did extendicare get government funds for covid while it continued to pay dividends to its shareholders? At that time, I was worried of a dividend cut but it didn’t happen. Once covid has come to pass maybe we will be looking at these homes differently and question the systems in place..

I decided to take roughly a 20% loss (minus like 4 years of dividends) and move that cash into something else.

• Sold 488 shares of exe & lost $232.00 in forward dividends from this sale.

Riocan

Riocan – yup I did it. I sold our position in Riocan. I have said how much I like this company and how retail will be fine, as well as how they are diversifying into residential.. I drove through the outskirts of Toronto one day last week and saw a tonne of for lease signs on both retail and office.

Covid has been devastating to businesses and unfortunately Trudeau screwed our vaccinations big time! I think we will be lucky in Canada if things go back to normal by the end of the fall. You hear of companies just hanging on, how long can they last? I feel for them… It’s sad to say but I think there will be a lot of bankruptcies coming up.

There will be a lot of places for lease and the avg sq ft landlords will be able to get for office/retail may drop due to lack of demand and increase of available property’s to rent. You could even question if there will be less people starting their own businesses after this. We now know the govt can just shut the small businesses down while letting the large corporations get all the business. It’s an added risk that people will probably think of moving forward.

I do think Riocan is a great business and love their recent moves into residential. At the same time though Ed said the dividend was safe and then cut the dividend at the end of the year. There also is the fact that Ed has been the ceo of Riocan since the start and will be now retiring in March 2021. (he will still be a board member) How will Gitlin do taking the reins while in this environment?

At the end of the day I wanted to lower our office/retail exposure. We hold both riocan and smart centres but I feel the walmart anchor is just huge! Companies will always want to be around walmart, they just bring in so much traffic. So Riocan got the cut.

We locked in a 25% loss. (minus all the dividends over the years)

• Sold 267 shares of Riocan losing $256.30 in dividend income

BMO

Bmo? Didn’t they just have that great earnings report? Yup! All the Canadian banks did and their stocks shot way up setting 52 week highs. Sweet! sell sell sell. Nothing against bmo, but I simply don’t need 4 different Canadian Bank holdings in the account. Both our bmo and National bank holdings are small. If you know me by now its all about getting those Drips!

I have been thinking about selling bmo for awhile, simply to focus on growing that national bank position and cutting one of our banks. This was the time.

Locked in a 30% gain plus all the years of dividends.

• sold 31 shares of bmo & lost $135.68 in forward income.

Sales Summary

In total we cut 3 positions from our portfolio and lost $623.98 in forward income. Obviously I put that cash right back to work for us though!

Purchases

Rit Etf

Since both Extendicare and Riocan paid monthly, I wanted to reinvest in a monthly paying stock/etf. Riocan sale was a big blow to our reit sector so I wanted to allocate that money into that sector. I recently started a position in RIT etf and think that’s a great spot to deploy the capital. I really like a reit etf as its so diversified and pays a solid yield.

While they hold some riocan its minor. The top 10 holdings are industrial and residential reits. So we moved the exe and riocan funds here. While I sold both stocks at a loss rit etf itself is down 17.16% from its 52 week high, so it makes the loss feel less drastic.

• Bought 481 units of Rit Etf. This adds $390.94 to those forward dividends.

Tc Energy

Recently I did a post on the top 3 stocks I want to add to our portfolio at current prices. Tc Energy was one of them and was in the same account as bmo. So I just decided to move that money into Trp. Like I said before we will still need traditional energy for awhile and with a cold winter like the one we are having, this should bode well for natural gas pipelines. Plus that 7.5% dividend raise the other week continues to make me smile.

• Purchased 57 shares of Trp  around 55$ adding $198.36 in forward income.

Lockheed Martin

As I said in the post above, Lockheed was my top target for February. It was tax time and I always try to maximize those contributions right before we file. This stock is cheap, offers a great starting yield, has good dividend growth and has over 100 billion dollars worth of backlog projects.

People think democrats will reduce govt spending on military. I think the opposite, I actually said they will be more active than trump was with the military. Here we are just over a month after Biden took office and missile’s are getting fired in Syria. Not to mention the growing worldwide tension with China accusing them of Genocide. You never want to see war or anything, but country’s will keep spending money on “defence”

• We started a new position & bought 14 shares at around $338 per share. Adding $145.60 usd to those forward dividends.

Xaw Etf

• We continued our monthly purchase of xaw etf 9 shares adds roughly 4 bucks.

Purchase Summary

We added to 3 positions and started a new one with lmt. All together these purchases added $738.90

Conclusion

After the portfolio cleanup and all these moves our portfolio will generate $114.92 more than it would before. I’m happy to cut our total positions down by 2 and beef up those existing ones. Something I have started to ask myself over the years is if any stock in the portfolio is down lets say more than 10% why would I not want to add to that position? If I don’t want to add when its in the red why do I own that stock?

BMO and Extendicare have always been on my mental chopping block for reasons I stated above. Riocan was just one I started questioning, wanted to lower our retail exposure and honestly enjoy the simplicity of Rit etf for most of our real estate exposure.

I love the look of our portfolio now but still question IBM, I’m asking the question I said above. I’m down on it and yet don’t want to add to them. (I’m hoping the new ceo can turn things around)

Who knows, things are always changing and I’m trying to improve and grow the portfolio as we go. What are your thoughts on these moves? Have you been buying anything these days? Finally seeing some red days again.

Cheers!