Recent Buy! June 2016

    I recently took advantage of the Brexit situation, where the people of the United Kingdom voted on a referendum to completely leave the European Union, with a winning vote of 52%. (BBC) So when North American markets opened on June 24th, they followed the trend of every other major stock market and plummeted. Global markets fell roughly around 3%, and wiped out a whooping 2 trillion  in wealth around the world!

    On that day, most of my portfolios positions fell, with the only hold outs being REIT's, and Pizza Pizza which barely moved. My bank positions all dropped around 2-4% as well as just about everything else. Going into this after learning that Brexit happened on Thursday before the TSX opened I prepared myself to expect at least a $1,000 in losses that day. And by the end of that Friday and the following Monday I indeed had a portfolio drop of about $1,000. I am happy to report though that since then those losses have been recovered, with even a bit of a gain!

At the time I was fortunate to have been sitting on some cash going up to the vote, and so I decided to deploy it when one of my positions dropped by over 6%!

    Manulife Financial was hit hard and dropped to $17.57 when I picked up my 55 new shares of this $33b insurance company. MFC currently supports a dividend of CAD$0.19 per quarter, $0.76 per year with a dividend yield at the time of purchase of 4.33%. So this purchase has added $41.80 to my annual dividend income.

    Since I already had a position in MFC, I now have a total of 190 shares with an average cost of $19.13, down from the previous $19.77. MFC now has a portfolio weighting of about 9%, so for the foreseeable future I will be holding off on adding any more to it, I am also a bit more overweight in Financials than I would like as well. However, when a seemingly good opportunity like a 6% drop in a quality company comes along it is very hard to not take advantage of it. The only unfortunate part of this purchase was that by the end of the day MFC dropped another 1%, and then on the following Monday dropped another 5%, going into the $16.60's range. Currently though the stock has been trading at $16.80-17.20. So considering I have a long-term view on this stock, I am happy to sit on the sidelines collecting a dividend of 4%+.