Recent buy: Ahold-Delhaize

I few days ago I started a position in Ahold Delhaize (ticker: AD). I outlined my reasons in my recent Seeking Alpha article which you can read here. I want to strengthen my Euro-denominated part of the portfolio. Ahold Delhaize yields around 3,9% and raised its dividend with a whopping 18% last time around. It is reasonably priced at the moment (at least in my opinion). It offers a stable business model with room to grow with its online business like Bol.com.

I added 60 shares for about € 23 per share. This purchase will add € 54 to my annual dividend income stream which stands at around € 2.025 pre-tax. With this purchse I reached a milestone of € 2.000 in dividend income! My next milestone will be € 2.400 (which is €200 per month on average). Hopefully I can reach this by the end of the year!

What do you think of my purchase?

Ahold Delhaize: A Big European Retailer At A Reasonable Price

I’ve been a dividend investor for almost eight years. One of my first purchases back in 2013 was Walmart (WMT). This purchase was successful based on the total return of around 10% per year, but the dividend growth has been rather slow. Right now I want to increase the Euro-denominated part of my dividend portfolio. This article will explain why I chose to start a position in Koninklijke Ahold Delhaize, a competitor of Walmart in the US market.

Business model

Ahold Delhaize (ADRNY) is a Dutch grocery retail company. Its business model includes supermarkets, convenience stores, hypermarkets, online grocery, online non-food, drugstores, and liquor stores. It’s focused on the US and European market. In the US the biggest local brands are Food Lion, Stop & Shop and Giant. In Europe the biggest local brands are Albert Heijn (The Netherlands), Delhaize (Belgium) and Mega Image (Romania). Roughly 40% of revenues are made in Europe and the other 60% in US markets. The biggest competitors in the US markets are (among others) Walmart, Target (TGT) and Kroger (KR).

Read the rest of the article at Seeking Alpha!

Dividend report: February 2021

February is over! Let's see how many companies sent me a dividend check for my ownership. These checks are the results of decisions I made earlier in life, sometimes years ago, where I decided to purchase shares in these companies. Nowaydays I still collect these checks but I have to do absolutely nothing to receive them. They just get deposited in my brokerage account, no questions asked. Isn't that great?!

Based on a constant exchange rate my dividend income grew by just under 10%. It's not bad considering what happened last year. The lack of dividend increases between Deere, OHI and AT&T and a measly increase from Realty Income (O) is starting to take its toll. Luckily, Deere announced a pretty sweet dividend raise last week, so in the next quarter that row will look a lot better in comparison with the year before! One of my latest additions Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) also paid its first dividend in february. However, due to changes in the exchange rate by dividend income in euro's (€) is more or less the same as last year. Nothing to worry, as that will probably change later in time or life.

With a great first month, and a decent 2nd, 2021 is off to a good start. In the last two weeks I also received several dividend increases which raised my forward dividend income to € 1.940. I will start to see these effects later on this year. It's cool to note that during these two months I received more dividend income than the whole of 2014 (my first full year of dividend investering). If I add the coming month of March I will (almost) surpass the whole of 2015, 2016 and 2017 as well (not combined obviously!). 

With the marktet upswing in February I also reached a new milestone in terms of portfolio value. I reached the € 50.000 milestone! The last € 10.000 took about 17 months which is about the same as the € 10.000 before that. I hope to reach the next €10.000 a bit faster and plan to increase my monthly contribution going forward. More on that in a later post because I used a little bit of financial engineering for that!

How was your second month of the year?