Did Tax Loss Harvesting Improve My Well-Valued Income Portfolio?

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Readers have expressed interest in what I’m invested in. Here I review my current holdings, the rationale for owning them, and their performance.

I then examine the sales I have made in this portfolio, looking at how the stocks I have sold have gone on to perform.

Most of my sales were to harvest tax losses. I compare the ongoing performance of the stocks I bought as replacements with that of those I sold.

Readers can benefit by avoiding several investing mistake identified here as well as by running similar analyses against their own trading activity.

Mikko Lemola/iStock via Getty Images Recently a few readers have asked me to give more detail about what stocks I personally own. It’s a reasonable question to ask of someone who has the nerve to give other people investing advice. If their investments aren’t doing well for them, why should you pay them any attention?

That made me think it might be a good idea for me to review how my investing has gone over the past two years, which is, not so coincidentally, the period in which I have begun writing about investments again.

All of us tend to feel good about stock frogs we kissed that turned into beautiful princes. Most of us, however, just try to forget about the ones we kissed that turned into warty toads.

With that in mind, I thought it might be instructive and even humbling to take a good look at the trades I’ve made since I started building up a portfolio of well-valued income-paying stocks and ETFs to replace the income I could no longer get from CDs. An Overview of My Current Holdings

Investment Strategy

My primary focus when I started building this portfolio in March of 2020 was to generate income to take the place of the income I was losing as rungs of my CD ladder came due. So most of the investments in this portfolio are income-oriented.

I like to think of myself as a value investor and I rely heavily on Fastgraphs and my own analysis spreadsheets to screen stocks. If you follow my writings you have seen me use those spreadsheets when valuing the most heavily weighted stocks held in ETFs. Once screened I do further research and use my common sense to evaluate whether a company really might be a good investment going forward, independent of the easily analyzed financial figures.

Though I want income from my investments, I also keep an eye on total return. I don’t strive to match the performance of S&P 500 at its most manic, but I want my stocks to grow their earnings and I like to see relatively consistent earnings growth which in time usually results in share price growth. My Current Holdings

Below you can see the entire list of my current stock holdings and how they have performed. Note that my total stock investment is broken out to roughly 25% individual stocks and 75% ETFs. Outside of this portfolio have held a large amount of the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF ( VTI ) since the early 2000s, but I don’t consider it part of this portfolio. The Author’s Brokerage Account My individual stocks were bought for income. I have increasingly been using the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF ( SCHD ) as a tax loss harvest partner when I have sold unsatisfactory dividend stocks. I tax loss harvested my latest SCHD buy in February and put the proceeds into the SPDR S&P 500 High Dividend ETF ( SPYD ) and the Vanguard High Dividend ETF ( VYM ).

Though you can see a heavy dividend emphasis in my holdings, not all the investments I have bought over the past two years were bought for income. As a believer in the wisdom of investing for the long term in broad market index funds, I have continued to make occasional investments in the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF ( VOO ) and the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF ( RSP ).

I bought the Vanguard Technology ETF ( VGT ) in June of 2020 in a departure from my usual value approach the spirit of “if you can’t beat them join them.” The momentum of tech stocks was irresistible. Over the last six months as inflation has picked up I also have been investing, in my IRA, in the Invesco DB Optimum Yield Diversified Commodity Strategy No K-1 ETF ( PDBC ). A Look At My Holdings Performing Poorly

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