Wall St. History

 The retail investor takes over the internet!

While you may be sick of hearing about it, I am posting about it here to keep it as a record of Wall St. history.  This past week, a reddit forum, WallStreetBets, got together and decided to buy a stock that some hedge funds had communicated that they shorted.  The stock was Gamestop initially, then it bled into others.  This put the pressure on the shorts to buy to cover, and to sell some oversold stocks to cover.  This is how it affected me, as stocks such as Target, Mastercard, and a few others that I own, had some buying opportunities (sometimes 5% drops on sale!).  Many of my friends wanted an explanation on what happened, and I ended up re-watching "The Big Short" with one of them, which is a great film for understanding what happened in the 2007 housing crisis, and what shorting a stock is.  I recommend watching it with Vidangel (a private company that I own stock in!) filters, due to adult language/content.

So, how did this affect me?  I was able to buy several of my stocks, and most notably Mastercard, on sale.  I have not been able to buy Mastercard since the inception of my dividend growth investment (DGI) account.  This is because Mastercard grew so fast, and I didn't have the disposable income I have now to catch it.  Mastercard quickly doubled in value since I bought it.  While it is still quite expensive and has a poor yield, it is easily my most reliable capital gain stock, and they have a good record of dividend growth.  I figure if I am ever in financial jeopardy, Mastercard will be the first to go.

I had bought my son some SPCE (Virgin Galactic) a year ago for a Christmas present for this past December.  It mostly went down after I bought it (it's not SpaceX after all).  It was also on the list of stocks targeted by retail investors as being shorted.  I told him to sell it - and he did for over double what it was paid for.  Carpe Diem, eh?  If he wants it back, he can wait until the short squeeze is over, then buy it back for probably less than I paid for it.  He seems to be more interested in buying a dividend stock, however.  

As of this writing, the reddit investors are "holding the line" until the shorts get squeezed.  I am not sure if they know when this will happen (depends on the contracts and their risk tolerance), but when it does, it will drive the price through the roof.  And very possibly cause a slight crash on the more stable company stocks as they sell to cover.  Good times.

Most of my companies showed a profit in the Q4 earnings, with the exception of Chevron, which had their first loss since 2016.  Chevron and Okeo are having a hard time with the Biden administration, which is not oil friendly.  A colleague who bought Okeo after the crash is thinking of selling.  I have a harder choice, since I would post a loss.  It would be quite a loss, but I would definitely be close to my tax harvesting limit of -$3k.  

Dividend Increases & Special Payouts

• Fastenal (NASDAQ:FAST) declares $0.28/share quarterly dividend, 12% increase from prior dividend of $0.25. Very nice, for an industrial parts vending machine company that was predicted to die thanks to Amazon.
• Kimberly-Clark (NYSE:KMB) declares $1.14/share quarterly dividend, 6.5% increase from prior dividend of $1.07.  Thanks, toilet paper!
• Archer-Daniels-Midland (NYSE:ADM) declares $0.37/share quarterly dividend, 2.8% increase from prior dividend of $0.36.  China has been buying a lot of corn!
• Air Products and Chemicals (NYSE:APD) declares $1.50/share quarterly dividend, 11.9% increase from prior dividend of $1.34.  Very nice increase.

January Purchases:

JNJ	4
HRL	18
ADM	3
APD	4
MA	7
ORI	172
CVX	4
FAST	4
XEL	4
IP	5
WTRG	6
SO	4
O	16
GIS	2
T	4
WEC	3
MCD	2