May 2021 Update - A Small Experiment - Truth Always Wins


Truth Always Wins

Background:

Dividend Portfolio - Dividend Growth Stocks.

Speculative Portfolio - Good companies that are richly valued high growth companies.

Both portfolios were started with 10% of my liquid assets each on Jan 1st 2021.

May Update:

May continued the trend from March and April.  For the third straight month, the Speculative portfolio continued to bleed while the Dividend portfolio continued to push ahead of even its pre-pandemic highs.  The Speculative portfolio has now lost all its gains.  I am no longer playing with house money!

I have so far not sold anything in my Speculative portfolio.  As discussed previously, I plan to be fully invested all the time.  If I sell any of these stocks now, then what do I buy?  Every speculative investment is falling.  Even BitCoin is falling!

Stock of the month:

DVN - I had purchased this stock just before the pandemic at $24 a share, only to see oil stocks plummet.  It kept going down and finally plumbed the depths at four dollar something.  It started climbing up in November and is now at $30 a share.  I have two investments in oil sector (a closed end fund NRGX being the other) and these likely have more legs.  Lesson from all this?  Since the theme of this post is truth, let me fess up and admit I have no idea!  I am not sure if it was brilliance, or laziness, or even forgetfulness that caused me to keep the stock.  Let's just go with brilliance. 

Numbers since Jan 2021:

S&P 500: 13.55% (up from 12.98% end of April)

Nasdaq Composite: 8.17% (down from 9.96% end of April)

Dividend Portfolio: 28% (up from 24% end of April)

Speculative Portfolio: 0% (down from 10.3% end of April)


Long Reads for the month

Good Immigrant Novels - The Drift (thedriftmag.com)

A classic review of desi immigrant literature by Sanjena Sathian.  Traces the history from inoffensive Jhumpa Lahiri with her apologetic tone and forgiving attitudes towards ignorance of the natives, all the way to its evolution to irreverent forms like Amitava Kumar - "Kailash tells the judge after sleeping with a white woman, “I have spoken filth in the ear of one of your fair citizens when I was inside her.”"

She brilliantly analyzes the constant and ever present tension between being authentic and worrying about the "bad image" that the authenticity implies.  She connects this tension to the experiences of other minority groups - especially the Jews.  And she finally weighs in with her own opinion using the words of one of the desi immigrant authors:

“Your picture is what white people already think of us…That we’re funny, with strange habits and weird customs… We have to protect our culture at this time, Karim. Don’t you agree?” Karim doesn’t agree: “No. Truth has a higher value.”


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