Tag Archives: COP

Scottrade FRIP Purchases – April 2016

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I have been making Scottrade FRIP purchases at the beginning of each quarter for a few quarters now. My last quarter purchases was little over $550.00. This quarter, my purchases ended up being higher at $677.08. The following are the FRIP purchases I made on 4/4/2016.

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Dividend Cut – COP

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After KMI’s dividend cut couple of months ago, another one bites the dust. COP announced the dividend cut this week. I have been expecting dividend cuts in this sector as I mentioned earlier when I set my goals for the year. COP announced a 66.2% dividend cut (from quarterly dividend of $0.74/share to $0.25/share). I own 50 shares in COP and this reduces my projected annual dividends by $98.00. This is a bigger dent compared to dent of ~85+ with KMI. Ouch.

I hold so many stocks in this sector – CVX, BBL, BP, NOV and BBL. Need to wait and see what happens.

My new projected annual dividends stands at $$3,232.41 now.

Recent Purchase – National-Oilwell Varco, Inc (NOV)

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It has been over 3 months since I made any big energy related purchase. The last ones were in November and December when I purchased ConocoPhillips. Since then the energy sector has been range bound and continues to be weak and hasn’t come out of the woods yet. These COP purchases are still in negative territory. But the energy sector still provides one of the most attractive valuations in these market conditions. So I ended up coming back to energy sector with this purchase.
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Scottrade FRIP Purchases – March 2015

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A while back I had posted about DRIP vs FRIP and why I participate in the FRIP program in Scottrade. I started participating in FRIP early last year and my dividends have been accumulating in FRIP for all my 3 Scottrade accounts. My first set of FRIP purchases were in early December and I purchased PG, PM and BP. I invested close to $1,150 across these 3 stocks without paying any commission. I had also mentioned that I will be making FRIP purchases about twice a year.

But when I checked my FRIP balance early last week, it was little over $600 across my three accounts. So I decided to make my next set of FRIP purchases on Friday last week (3/6/2015). The following are the FRIP purchases I made on 3/6/2015.  Continue reading →

Goals update December 2014

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I like to review the progress at least once a month to determine where I am with respect to meeting/achieving my goals.

These are the goals for 2014:

  • Invest at least $30,000
  • Receive at least $1,500 in dividends
    • With an extra $189.70 in December dividends, the total for the year has hit $1,594.02
    • Goal Achieved
    • This a great achievement. I had started dividend focused investing this year and I was not sure if I could achieve this. But with several new investments at the beginning of this year helped me to achieve this goal.
  • Achieve at least $2,200 in projected annual dividends
    • With the new purchases in the recent months and dividend increases announced, my current projected annual dividends for 2015 stand at $2,235.39.
    • Goal Achieved
    • As I mentioned in the previous month, the KMP to KMI switch happened in December. This reduced my projected dividends a bit.
    • Also, ARCP announced that they are going to eliminate the dividend until further notice. This was a big blow and reduced the projected annual dividend by $125.00.
    • With the double blow, I was not sure if I will be meeting this goal, but the December purchases definitely helped to meet this goal.
  • Have a portfolio of at least 25 stocks/ETFs
    • Goal Achieved
  • Maintain this blog and keep it updated regularly
    • Since beginning this blog early this year, I have posted regular updates on the progress. I hope to continue to do this in 2015 as well as this is a great motivation.
    • Goal Achieved

The goals page has been updated to reflect the progress.

I will be publishing the 2015 goals soon.

Scottrade FRIP Purchases

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A while back I had posted about DRIP vs FRIP and why I participate in the FRIP program in Scottrade. My dividends have been accumulating in FRIP for all my 3 Scottrade accounts since around the beginning of the year. By last week, I had accumulated over $1200 combined across all 3 accounts. I decided to make the purchase using the FRIP dollars and hence placed the orders on Friday to be executed on Monday. The following are the FRIP purchases I made on 12/8/2014.  Continue reading →

Recent Purchase – COP

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The oil price continues to slide down and this is putting pressure on oil and energy stocks. This has open up buying opportunities in this sector.

COP is one of the stocks that I purchased when I first started investing back in 2009. I still hold it, even though it is not a lot of shares. Since then, COP spun off PSX and I continue to hold that too. Also, in the past few months, I have invested in other stocks in the Oil/Energy sector like CVX, KMP and BP. But I always wanted to add more to my COP holdings. Few months back, I almost placed an order for COP at around $67.00, but instead purchased CVX. Since then COP went from $67.00 to about $87.00 in a span of few months. I was kicking myself thinking that I would never be able to get more COP at $60s.

But like they say – Never say never. The oil price decline has bought the stock back to high 60s for now and I didn’t want to miss this time.
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Dividend Diversification – Update

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A while back I had posted about Dividend Risks and the need for dividend diversification. Back then, 6 stocks (GE, MO, KMP, ARCP, AAPL and HPQ) contributed close to 60% of my total projected annual dividends at that time ($1,590.46) even though some of these stocks didn’t have a huge weight in my portfolio. This is little risky, since if one of the companies cuts or eliminates the dividend, it will be a huge hit to my potential annual dividends.

A course of action that I had planned was to increase the weight in stocks that I already held like PG, COP and GIS, but did not have lot of weight in my portfolio. But unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to increase my holdings in these stocks. But over the past few months, I did initiate positions in several new stocks which has helped reduce the reliance for potential dividends in the above stocks.

Based on the updated portfolio (updated as of 9/30/2014), these 6 stocks (GE, MO, KMP, ARCP, AAPL and HPQ) contribute just under 50% of my total projected dividend income of $2,039.58. This is in spite of recent dividend increases. So while 50% is still higher than I like it to be, I feel that it is good progress in 4 months. I will revisit this in the next few months and see where I stand.

Disclosure: Long on all stocks mentioned above.