What Did You Buy Today?

[ken-do-nim]

Sorry I've exasperated you, let me respond to your individual points.

> The yield chase trading game is beyond farcical as you dump them when they show themselves as yield traps that most of them are, despite 100 warnings on this forum.

First off, the whole high dividend payers search is part of a 'training exercise', if you will, for building a dividend paying machine that I can use at retirement. I am hopeful that some of them I will be able to maintain for the long term and aren't, in fact, yield traps. Yes absolutely, ORC, AGNC and NLY had to be cut, and in hindsight I was hoping, like Genester hopes now, that at a low enough price, they are worth buying, when that really isn't the case, since they over time continue to erode. I expect one day to have to exit OXLC for similar reasons but I'm giving it some time to play out. But others, like HTGC, PFL, and ARCC don't have a history that suggests they are just 'return of capital'. I believe a mixture of such high yielders, middle yielders (the ABBVs and PRUs of the world), and lower yielders (SCHD, CSCO, STX, AVGO all up in the high 2s low 3s) will be my eventual lineup for retirement, as I attempt to aim for an average portfolio yield of around 5-6%. If I reach the $3M target, that's $150-180k annually. Of course, given the way inflation is going, $150k in 12 years may not be enough! But in that case I simply won't retire if I don't have to.

> Your company stock sells are already taxed right? There is your income you say you require now. Sufficient balance to fund your extra expenses for years.

In fact that was my plan coming into 2021. Sell $4500 - $12500 a quarter, and supplement the monthly budget with $1500. In practice, when the company stock had a downturn, I didn't want to sell. Dividends are much more reliable. This kind of answered my whole question that I posed when I first joined the forum about just buying growth stocks and selling for living expenses at retirement vs. dividends.

> After reading about your literally weekly buy high and sell low chronicles

I've definitely made some mistakes recently (*cough* RIO *cough*), but I think we have a different investing philosophy. Let's take the recent AMZN venture as an example. Amazon is a stock I eventually want to own. I missed the big run-up thanks to Amazon Web Services that I didn't know were coming, but they've leveled off in recent years. I do think there's other big breakthroughs the company is capable of, but I feel I can wait until next year to have some Amazon. However, when they dropped suddenly a few weeks back, I decided to bring them into the fold earlier than planned, in case it immediately corrects back up (like say, Lowes did recently). It didn't work out, so I moved on to other priorities. I really don't mind taking a minor loss because I've already got large gains on the year that can be offset.

Big picture wise, I'm actually doing pretty well. I'm sure there are others on this forum blowing me away, but I'm learning. Taxable account is up 24.59% year to date, ROTH is up 59.68% year to date, whereas the S&P 500 is up 18.25%, with the Dow Jones and Nasdaq at lower amounts.