January 2020 Portfolio Update. Invest and diversify.

I hope that the new Year found all of you well and healthy. It is the flu season after all. Now let’s get down to investing, on December and on January I increased my investments in Mintos and US stocks using Revolut. These investments amount in about one of my monthly wage. One of the advantages of getting an extra month’s of pay on Christmas in Greece is that if you stick to your budget including gifts and holidays you can save the rest and invest them, and this is exactly what I did.

On Mid December I invested in the following stocks Alphabet(GOOGL), Mastercard(MA) and PayPal(PYPL). Since then they have gone up between 7-9% pretty good for holding them only one month. This week I added to my stock portfolio Apple(AAPL), General Mills(GIS) and Nike(NKE), also in the green with about 1% increase. The US stock market is pumped and it might seem a little scary for a newcomer.

The thing that reassures me is that in a case of a stock market crash I will be buying with a discount, as I will be implementing the cost averaging technique. My strategy is to invest steadily for at least till my early 50’s and it is certain that there will be recessions and growth periods in these 2 decades(currently I am in my early 30’s), so making quick gains is not part of this strategy. All the companies I am investing are companies that have valuable products and services. Furthermore I am here for the long run, at least 20 years, by then I hope I have saved enough for me to not need to work anymore. Not that I will not want to work, but I will have the financial independence and will not need to wait the prime age of 67-70 to take my pension to be able stop work. I believe that this will give me the freedom to live in my own terms, even when I probably will not have the ability to change jobs and hunt opportunities as I currently have.

Back to my stock portfolio now since it’s inception it has grown by 12%, it is up to par with the rest of the market. It is a good time to be in the stock market just for the enjoyment that you get when you see your portfolio’s value increase.
Here you can see the actual growth of them.

Furthermore for my other investment types, Mintos is performing steadily with about 11%, they also introduces an Android app which is still in beta. When and if any of the other investment from other platforms finish I will redirect that capital to Mintos, I already started doing this as the rest of the platforms do not provide the same returns.
Lastly I am reviewing a new P2P lending platform IBAN Wallet. It seems that it has potentials for some specific cases, but I will write a full review in the near future.