Stash Invest: My Portfolio Weekly Recap (2017-06-03)

Hello and welcome to my weekly Stash Invest recap where I will go over how my portfolio has been affected through the market week. If you are unfamiliar with Stash Invest, it is an app that allows you to invest with as little as $5 using fractional shares so even someone who doesn't have much money can get started. I plan to make a lot more posts about Stash - which I think is an excellent beginner's tool to help get into investing - so follow me to learn a lot more about it.

This week largely continued last week’s upward trend, which saw markets rebound nicely after the previous week took a big hit. There was also a new ETF added to those supported through the app. I will go into that in some more detail after the weekly recap, so let’s get on with it!

Week Open
After last week rebounded very well, I regained all the returns that I had lost to close out the previous week.

Day 1
Tuesday after Memorial day, there was not much movement in the market. I was able to check out a new fund that got released this day. I threw in a $100 and we’ll see where that goes. If nothing else, the portfolio has grown and, with no buy and sell fees, I can get rid of it anytime and divert the funds elsewhere.

Day Two
Another yawn-fest today, as my funds didn’t really move, added another $20.

Day Three
I am still looking forward to a market crash, at which point I will invest larger amounts in some of my highest performing funds, but I don't want to buy in while they are at record levels. Nor am I not going to complain about good money days. Either way, I believe the $11 gain is officially a single-day high for me, so that was exciting to see!

Day Four
More good gains to close out the week, and I’m sitting pretty at a record high $48.79 return. The only thing that really annoys me about the app is that the $1 monthly fee, when paid directly from this account and not my bank, will still count as part of your return. I do everything in $20 increments to keep things measurable on my end, so that $2 disparity between my return and portfolio is because my dividends have paid for that monthly fee.

I really wish it would lower my return in the process, or at least give me some other way to account for the costs of using the app to get a better sense of performance. For now, the numbers are small and easy to calculate, but down the road it’s going to take a lot more work to factor in those small monthly payments.

This screener shows percentage returns over time and the funds Rsf, or Relative Strength Factor, of the funds in this portfolio . I will delve into this more in a future article, but the idea behind this metric is to compare one fund with all other funds. It is scored on a scale from 0 to 100, 100 being the best. This, of course, is only comparing current performance, not overall and obviously isn’t the only factor to measure when considering an investment.

New ETF Added: Up & Coming (Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets ETF)

There was a vote recently within the Stash community that pitted three ETFs against each other, with only one being chosen for addition to the Stash lineup. Happily, the one I voted for won, and was added Tuesday right after the holiday. I like this one the most as the other two were representing Asia and EU markets specifically and I like the idea of emerging markets because of the potential for long-term gain.

The one thing I didn’t check until after buying in (which I would have done regardless just to test it out) was analyze the long-term charts, which have proven to be very up and down. This looks like an interesting fund that could provide some opportunity to buy and sell on a longer-term. I don't think it's one I would keep for too long though, as there are just better funds (currently) to invest in. The dividend yield is pretty decent and the expense ration is very low, so that is a nice aspect of it, but it's nothing impressive as plenty of other funds have similar payout. We'll see what I decide to do with it later on.

Looking Forward
I will continue to post overviews of the funds I am currently invested in, probably one every week or two. I’m also going to get into some investing jargon to explain a variety of terms. Most of my investments will be paying dividends at the end of this month, so that will be pretty fun to see how much that has increased over the last quarter. I made a couple dollars last time...just enough to keep my Stash fees at bay, so I would expect it’s going to be 2-3 times more this time around just because I’ve added significantly to my portfolio since then. If you want to learn more about Stash Investing, check out this old article. I plan to redo it and continue the series soon.