Welcome to my blog! In this blog, I will write about my journey of investing in dividend paying stocks. I will mainly target stocks that have a long history of paying and increasing dividends over time, hence the blog is called Dividend Growth Quest (imagine here a wizard trying to harvest piles of gold from dragon lairs).
I’m new on my quest, so I’ll be learning as I go. I aim to document my journey and share my thoughts and ideas. I hope you find it interesting and maybe even useful. However, I need to remind that I’m not a financial advisor; you should not take anything you read as a piece of advice. Always do your own research and preferable invest only money you can lose. In the end, I’m just a regular human being trying to make sense of the investing world and make some money along the way.
hello, world
– Brian Kernighan’s example C-program from book Programming in C: A Tutorial
By the way, I’m working as a software developer and I have a background in computer science. So, I might sometimes go for references in the programming world. I hope you don’t mind.
So, What Are My Goals?
I want to build a portfolio of dividend stocks that will generate passive income to help cover my living expenses. I’m not planning to retire early, but if the stars align and I manage to accumulate wealth faster than I thought, I might reconsider it. My plan is not to sell my stocks to generate income. Instead I want to live off the dividends. Dividend growth investing might not be the quickest way to do it, but it’s a way that I feel comfortable with. However, I’ll reserve a small percentage for growth stocks, just to keep things interesting. If they perform well, I’ll sell those stocks and buy more dividend stocks to boost the dividends.
What I know about investing?
I actually know the basics. I have been investing in the stock market from 2018 via ETF, some mutual funds and stocks. Individual stocks have been almost solely in the Finnish stock markets, due to lower transactions fees in Nordnet, a Nordic stock broker. Most stocks I have bought have been growth stocks with low to none dividend payments. However, I have felt pride in owning teeny tiny share of local companies I know, and whose services and products I consume.
What I don’t know about investing?
I think the biggest gap in my knowledge is that I can’t read financial statements or balance sheets. I do know, that companies have their estimates and when they fail to meet those stock price goes usually down. When they beat the estimates, the stock price goes up. But deeper understanding about the financial state of a company is something I can’t currently figure out. That’s one of the first things I need to fix.
I’m already familiar with some of the financial indicators, like P/E, P/B, ROI, EPS, etc. But knowing what those things mean doesn’t necessarily mean that I know how to use them. I aim to learn how to apply those indicators to asses companies individually and in comparison to the industry they operate in.
What can you expect from this blog?
I plan to educate myself in the coming years, be it through books, blogs, podcasts, videos, etc. When I learn something, I hope to find the motivation to write it down and therefore make my findings and thoughts more concrete. I’ll likely do monthly update about the current state of my portfolio, discussing dividends earned and how I decided to allocate my cash.
I feel like when you are starting the journey, it’s good to have peers in the similar position as you are. I’ll strive to make the blog interesting and show that anyone can learn these aspects, even without a background in finance or economics.
In the future, I’ll want to do deep-dive into individual companies and attempt to value them. If I get there, I’ll document my process and thoughts. But that’s not something I’m capable of doing right now. There’s a long journey ahead.
What’s next?
My next post will cover my initial investments: which stocks I decided to invest in first and the rationale behind those choices.
With much love, Dividend Growth Quest