June is over! We're halfway 2023. June was a rather nice month in terms of stock price development (but not if you want to purchase new shares I guess). I had some big winners in the industrial sector like CMI (+18%), DE (+15%) and AOS (+11%), but also MPW performed lovely (+13%) after its decline earlier this year. Biggest loser was ASML with -2% so nothing I can't handle :-)
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?!
A total of almost €330 after tax. 14 companies paid me dividends. The dividend income decreased by a lot compared to last year. This decrease has two reasons:
- A deferred dividend from my employer Brink in order to fund the acquisition of another company.
- No special dividend/spin-off from BHP. Last year I received shares of Woodside Energy Group as part of the merger of their oil and gas business with BHP. I recorded this as a special dividend from BHP.
Without these two events my "regular" dividend income grew with about 13%. This is mainly the result of additional purchases in TROW (here), Aflac (here) UNP (here and more recently here), CMI, JNJ (here) and O (here). Compared to last year I also had a new position in BLK (here and here). I already announced that for this quarter Intels dividend will be reduced due to a dividend cut. That's a shame of course, but sometimes that happens.
So all in all a fine month! I've used the dividend from Unilever and Shell to drip additional shares in both companies. I expect to use my available cash position to invest later in August.
In the graph above I've showed my monthly dividend income. You can see last year's high dividend payments but the underlying trend is still up.
How was your June? What is your watchlist?