We just had the best first quarter since 2009 and history points to another surge or so, CNBC says. We're going to be taking a look at that. We're going to be looking at that, My Portfolio, how it's done in comparison to the S&P 500, which is the benchmark that I'm using to compare this to. I'm also going to be looking at a couple news items. Apple is launching a new credit
card. I'm going to be talking a little bit about that following a little bit more up about the things I talked about three days ago and Boeing as well as answering some of your question. I'll just dive right in with the portfolio part of it to begin with. First I I'm not going to be doing the full like I have this page where I track dividends and I usually wait on this because I know that we're we're done with March, we're done with March
after this weekend. But what I like to do with M1 Finance, I could go through and try to add up manually all the dividends in the history, but that is prone to me getting it wrong and getting some kind of error. So what I do is I just go to the settings page and then on the settings page it has it has statements and I just look at the monthly statement and it has the total dividends that I was paid during that time period. So I think that's a much more
accurate way. Once I get that, it will be sometime next week when M1 updates that. Once I get that, I'll be able to update this graph and show you where March is at and I'll be able to upgrade this quarter one. So the quarter one is over a three month period, this one's month to month. So we can see the trends here on this one and we can see the trends here on the quarter. Hopefully this will keep going up, it'll keep trending upwards, but we'll take a look at some
other things now. Right now if I go to the quarter view, total view were up 28 percent 3400 dollars quarter though it makes up for a lot of that. So just the past three months, since December 29, we have 2350 in market gains and dividends earned 278. I'm a little bit below that $100 a month mark that I want to hit. So 278 like $22.00 below it. I'm getting close there. I want to be able to hit it soon though. But you can see this quarter has been fantastic.
If you look at the sectors, every single one of them's up. I could go through and there's some companies that are down, but even despite those, everything is mostly up like Abby's down. There's some here and there that have specific things going on. But for the most part, it's doing great. I mean, consumer outlook, look at every single consumer holding I have all of them up and real estate, I believe all of them are up as well. Finance, I think Maine is the only one that was down.
This, this past three months has been an amazing start to the year. The S&P 500 has gone up 13%. Now if I look at My Portfolio, My Portfolio has gone up 10% and you might the initial impression people have and I see this all the time on Reddit, on social media, that people don't know how to rate the performance of a portfolio. I wanted to go through this to begin with and I wanted to show you how to rate the performance of a portfolio.
Before doing that, I did want to just comment on one other thing real quick. That I was looking at this video here and the analytics on it and this was a 46 minute video, 46 1/2 minute video that I put out by far the longest. And it was pretty incredible to see that the viewer retention didn't really suffer at all. It was right in line. It was all the rest of my videos that you guys have a great
attention span. So I've been told like with YouTube that you know, you got to have these like 5 minutes super ADD videos that just jumped from one thing to the next and that that's the only way that you can catch people's attention. Not true. I'm seeing a lot of people that when they start the video they they watch all the way through and the viewer attention rate usually goes up more and more after releasing a video. Pretty cool to see that a lot of people watch this long of a
video. So I hope you guys enjoy the the content but moving on to this, what I wanted to go over particularly about this is what I think is a mistake and how people view performance and how they analyze it.
I see comment threads and and different topics posted like the S&P 500 beat these five hedge funds, right, because the S&P 500 performed 30% over these five years or or whatever it may be in the hedge funds only perform 20 and the hedge funds are expensive and they have management fees. True, over those many years S&P 500 quote UN quote beat them. But that doesn't take an effect what their set goals are and what those hedge funds are aimed to do.
A lot of times, people that have a ton of money, an enormous amount of money. They're not looking to maximize the returns. They're looking for capital preservation, meaning they're not concerned as much in keeping up with the S&P 500 as it goes up. They're more concerned with keeping most of their money when the S&P 500 goes down. And so it's disingenuous or either ill ill informed to just go by the ranking one, things are good and I want to talk about that here.
Let me go and show you guys so you can see for yourself. Here's the S&P 500 zoom in a little bit here. Now if I go six months here and then I go to January 1st right there, right. It's I You can't. It's one day off, but it's 13% is what it is, 13%. And then I go and I look over here in My Portfolio, 10 percent, 10.2%. Right now, at first glance, I have underperformed the SP500. So I have a lower alpha of the SP500. But there's other scores.
There's a beta score, which is your volatility. And that's what I wanted to look at. Let's go to the I know you guys love my drawings. They're the best. I get messages all the time about how good of an artist I am. I go ahead and draw this. I have this online drawing board here. If we have now, let me change, let me change that to black. I'm just going to make a simple graph here. So we have a Y axis and an X axis. Here the X axis is 0% returns.
OK, that's just flat. Anything on our this is negative, anything over it is positive. And let's say that you this is all hypothetical. So let's say that you have a portfolio, let's say the SP500 returns 10% for a given time period and that's S&P 5 Okay, that's the S&P 500 right there. Now let's say that you let's say that your portfolio returns 15% during that same given time
period. Now just having this information and let's say it's like a three month period or a six month period or even a year period, Just having this information alone does not show you if you're outperforming the S&P 500, because if the S&P 500 goes down 10% and then that's the S&P and then your portfolio goes down 15%, you did no
outperformance here. All you have is a portfolio with higher volatility, with a a higher beta score, meaning it what it takes whatever the the benchmark that it's going against and it just has a higher volatility. If that benchmark goes up, this one goes up further. If it goes down, this one goes down further. That's what you're doing and that and that in my opinion at least is not outperformance at all.
If the S&P 500 goes up 10% and you go up 15 and if it goes down 10% and you go down 15, you have not outperformed. That's and P500, you simply have a more aggressive higher volatility portfolio. Likewise if the SP500 like in my situation here, let's get rid of this and get rid of this.
Now if the SP500 like it has, goes up 13 and mine goes up 10 and the SP500 goes down 13 and mine goes down 10, I have not outperformed the S&P 500. I haven't underperformed it, but I haven't outperformed it either.
Now what outperformance would look like to me is if the S&P 500 goes up 13%, I go up 10 and the S&P 500 goes down 13% and I go down 5 or I go down even 8, that's a slight outperformance or seven or anything that is below what I am leading when it goes up. So I hope you can see the difference there is I'm looking for a portfolio that can follow somewhat on the uptrend by that it keeps most of its gains on the down downward side of it. Now I don't know if that's
happening right now. Most of the time the S&P 500 has gone up and so there's not enough information for me to see if I'm really outperforming the S&P 500 right now. I know for sure that I have a lower volatility portfolio and I'm okay with if it. The graph just looks like this.
I'm okay with that. If the if the S&P 500 goes up and mine trails a little bit, but if it goes down and it trails a little bit that to me is what I want more than if it just matches it. You just want to match the S&P 500 then just invest in the S&P 500. I'm okay with this right now. But what I'm hoping is that if it goes down mine will trail the downward side more than it did the upward side. That's the note on out
performance. A lot of the hedge funds that you guys compare your portfolios to or basic benchmarks, totally disingenuous to compare it to. I remember once that one day one topic on Reddit was like comparing it to this Harvard fund and the the purpose of the fund was totally capital preservation. So all they wanted to do is keep their money and of course they lagged a lot of the benchmark performance because they were invested in a lot less risky things. You can't really compare your
portfolio straight across. I know it's easy to just focus in on this part and and you know and go and and brag to your mom and family and stuff that look, look how good I'm doing. I'm outperforming right. I'm, I'm getting 13 when it's getting 10, that's great. But you need to see the whole picture to really see if you're outperforming. So anyways that's all I wanted to point out on that. I'll move on from that. Aside from that, let's look at the rest of the portfolio and the dividends.
Now I have $278 in dividends for the last three months and for the last entire year period since March 30th, 2018, I have 640. Again, it's one of those situations where the last three months I have like a rent a little less than half the dividends I have for the whole year. It's definitely going at an
upward trend. The amount of dividends I'm being paid now I look at My Portfolio and I was honestly surprised that it returned 10% when the market returned 13 because that's following the market a little bit closer than I anticipated, especially with the fact that I have 33% of My Portfolio in real estate and 20% in bonds and 14% in utilities. The S&P 500, the benchmark I'm going to I'm comparing myself with has like 2% in utilities, none in bonds and very little in
real estate. Has a few real estate holdings, but very little. I have a completely different portfolio than the S&P 500, yet I'm tracking it pretty closely. I don't know what it means. We're going to have to see, when we get into a natural bear market, how mine fares. You know, I can, I can try to gear myself towards it, but I don't know if if real estate is just going to crumble or what's going to happen. I think it will be more conservative. At least having 20% in bonds
seems like. It seems to me like it would be a lot more conservative, especially since half these bonds are treasury bonds. So I know 10% of My Portfolio is very, very secure and then this is investment grade bonds. So none of these are junk bonds. But it's difficult to guess what's going to happen in the future. I think this will be a more conservative portfolio when we have a downturn. But I don't know, you know I have 10% when the S&P 500 return 13% and that's tracking pretty
close. So that's just lagging it just a little. If it lags it that little on the downside, that's a more volatile portfolio than I want and I'll probably end up making adjustments to it. Other than that, I'll leave this for now. Like I said, I'll update, I'll update these graphs probably next week when I get the information to plug that in and and make it accurate. But I wanted to go on and talk about a little bit of the news we have over here.
Just I want to touch on this just real quick. I won't go back all the way back into it, but if you've watched any of my past two videos, you know that I've talked about Boeing and the issues they've been facing with their 737 Max. I talked about how disappointed I wasn't Boeing, and I just wanted to show this article because it it confirms the belief that they had initially that it was this MCAS system, this this system that tried to automatically get the plane out
of stalls. This is what they're believing more and more is causing it. Boeing's down here says, like, you know, it's not totally confirmed. The whole investigation is not completely finished, but at the same time, Boeing, that's kind of what they're saying right now, the same time they're making all the changes to that
system. I think even Boeing believes that's the cause of it. I don't think it's going to be anything different unless something crazy comes out, some information that it was something else that caused it. I think it was a system that was a failure. That's what Boeing's fixing right now. We'll see what happens with that, but I'll keep you updated on that story as well. The other thing I wanted to talk about, Let's go over to here, the Apple card.
This is Apple Card, a credit card created by Apple, not a bank. So it's simple, transparent and private. And it's the only credit card designed to take advantage of the power of iPhone. Okay. So Apple came out with this new card. They announced it at their big meeting that they had and there's been a lot of reactions to it. So I'm not going to go through super detailed on like every feature. In fact, I wanted to take this more from an investment
standpoint than a financial. I'm not going to be looking at the financial credit card standpoint as much as the investment standpoint. A few things I will comment on, a few things on the card itself that I think are different. It seems like Apple's viewing their credit card as their iPhone, your iPhone is the card they want. A big a big push for Apple Pay. The rewards on this are 2% if you use Apple Pay, 1% if you actually use the physical card.
Even though they made this, you know, this beautiful looking titanium laser edged card. They don't really want you to be using that. They want to be. They want you to be using your iPhone and you can't even get the card without an iPhone. They're trying to, they're trying to tie this back into the iPhone as much as they can. The things that I have actually seen with the card that I'll note that I think are pretty cool that I don't think a lot of people, other people focused on was.
One of them was the fact that they have a a far more customizable payment scheduler on it. If I go to my Chase card or my Amazon Prime card or anything like that, I can only pay it off automatically once a month. If I want to pay it off more frequently than that, I have to manually go in and do it. I can't do any scheduling like, oh, I get paid on on the 10th and 25th or 5th and 20th, and I can't just schedule those days to automatically pay off my
balance in full. I have to remember I have to mainly do it. If I forget, then I what good's a month payment when you you get paid every two weeks, right? I thought it was really cool that they have a scheduler in this where you can just say, I want to pay it off these two days of the month or I want to pay it off every single week. And then I don't think people getting as much credit card debt, if they're having automatically paid off every single week. Thought that was a really cool
feature. And then I thought, the dial where it shows you, there's one part of it I'll show you right here. It shows you how much interest you're being. You're being charged in it though. It has this part here. You pay clear and transparent. Pay off a little. The interest is this much. Pay more. I think this was a pretty awesome thing for them to do, and I'll explain why. Most credit card companies, they make the majority of their money by this this interest.
That's how they offer rewards to people that don't pay interest and I They charge other fees to merchants and things. But the huge majority of money they make is off of interest, and it's naturally a disincentive for you to pay off your card for the credit card company. They want to be charging you interest and they want you to be
paying all those extra fees. Now, Apple's taken the opposite approach and they project how much interest you're going to be paying right in front of your nose and bright red text every time that you make a payment. And I think that's pretty awesome because the incentive there for them, what they're incentivizing you to do, is pay off your your card and not paying any interest on it. That I thought was pretty
different. I think it's a a cool thing for a company to do that instead of taking their out of obfuscating and making it more confusing and try to disassociating how much interest you're really paying from from you. They're making it as clear as day, putting it right in front of you know, saying you're going to pay this much in interest. And I don't think Apple wants to make money off of the interest payments. I'll explain why they don't even need to make money off of this credit card.
They will, but they don't need to And I'll explain more of that if you look at let's go, let's in fact let's go back to the drawing board here. I'm going to erase this and let me look at Apple. Here we have any company, and I've talked about this before with moats and ecosystems, we have a company like Apple, right? Okay Apple. Now if Apple is a tent in the ground, let's just say every company is a tent and you're camping out in a really windy mountain.
If Apple is this tent, every single thing that they can do to keep that tent down, I'll call it a steak. They have one steak, which is the iPhone, and that helps keep the tent down. That's the iPhone. I know that you can't read that, but that's the iPhone right here. That's one steak. Then they have iMessage. That's another steak keeping the tent down. Then they have, they have their iCloud backup, so they have the cloud backup. That's another stake keeping the tent down.
Then they have the Apple card, that's another stake keeping the tent down. They have, they have their MacBook, which goes into iMessage. So all their devices are tied into the one platform. They have their photo backup. They have all these different stakes and each one of these are yanking this tent to the ground. Each one of these are buried in the ground, one of them by
themselves. If you took away all of these and you only had the iPhone, that's enough that if a big windstorm comes along, it'll blow this tent right away,
right? But once you start adding an iMessage, once you start adding in the the iCloud photo backup, once you start adding in Apple Pay, once you start adding in the App Store and all the the stuff you've purchased from that, all of these in in Apple Music and your subscription to that and your your library that you know you can really only use Apple Music with Apple products. All of these act to keep this
tent on the ground. And the reason that's important is the more that they have holding this tent down, which really is you. I mean this is the user from jumping over here to Android, right? Android has their own tent and they have their own features trying to do the same thing every company does. But the the company that has more of them and they have better of them is going to be better at keeping their customers wrapped up in their own ecosystem.
And with Apple Card, it's just one more of these, one more of these things that that tie you down that you can't, you can't get away from. What's going to happen is people are going to, they're going to innocently, you know, they don't even have to think about it that much. They can innocently just go, oh wow, this looks, it's completely free. It looks nice and it's completely free. I would like a new card. So I'm going to go ahead and sign up for it.
And then Apple, you know, they're like you'll get it the same day type of thing. You'll get it on your phone and and they want to get it, get it to people quick, make it free. Because what's going to happen is people going to, they're going to use it to sign up for their Netflix, they're going to use it to sign up for their Apple Music or all these
different purchases. Some people might put their utility bill on it. Some people might put other monthly reoccurring bills on it. And then when another credit card comes out, when Samsung or Android or whatever comes out with their own credit card, you're going to go, well, that one, even if it has better rewards. Gosh, I have all these monthly purchases wrapped up to this
card. Do I really want to go through the effort of, of contacting all these customer, all these companies and updating my payment information to this new card that has slightly better rewards, right. No, you're not going to do that because that's that's work that's less convenient. You already have this card that you're you're used to that has all these monthly payments wrapped to it, and all that does is make it so it's more difficult to escape. So whether the card is the best
card or not, it doesn't matter. And whether Apple makes a lot of money specifically from this card doesn't matter. What does matter is that it keeps people in the Apple ecosystem because out of all these stakes, even if they're all making a little bit of money, that's money from this one person going out to all these different things.
And odds are if it's not the card that's making a lot of money, it's going to be the Apple Music, it's going to be the the Apple Store, or it's going to be you buying new Macbooks because you have iMessage and all these other services tied to it. One of these is going to make Apple money. A lot of them, if not a couple of them. But all of these work to secure you down and I think that's why the Apple card is a a good idea for Apple. I I think it's a great idea.
As long as they can get people to to sign up and use it, which I certainly think they will, it's going to help people. It's going to help their ecosystem even more. It's going to help their their walled garden even more. Other than that, I just wanted to go and answer a few questions. All right, let me answer a few of your questions. I'll go through them and then a couple questions that I found online.
One of them's from Lee Almighty asked how much do you usually put in, how often He's asking about my deposit schedule, how I go about deciding how much money to put in and how frequent. So let me go to the funding tab here. This is on M1 Finance. Again, you can do all the stuff on any broker. M1 does have a pretty cool scheduler where I can I can schedule at least some minimum deposits that I want on the days I'm paid.
This is for my taxable account. I have the same thing going for my my Roth IRA, the same the 5th and 20th. The 5th and 20th is when I schedule. If it doesn't have the 20th, it'll just go to the next the
next business day. I have 250 going each of those, so it's pretty much $1000 a month is what I try to do the minimum between the two accounts, and that'll happen until my Roth is full, which should just go the whole year because I can put 6000 in SO500A month is like the entire year, but this is what I do as a minimum. Now. That might be more than what
some people can afford. I can't say this is as much as you should do. Now my deposit history is obviously quite a bit more than 1000 a month. So I already have about 8000 deposited in this year. Last year I put in 22,000 and then 2017 is when I started the till end of that I put in 2200. Obviously it's been kind of sporadic and irregular. I put in money when I have it available to me because what I found is the the whole idea of, like the Dave Ramsey storing 8 months of money.
That's great, but to a lot of people there's psychology behind it that outweighs it, that if you have money available to you, it seems to find a place to be spent. If you don't disassociate from it, put it in a different account. When I put money into an investment account, it's totally out of sight, out of mind. We don't look at it as spendable money anymore. It's not spendable anymore. It's money that's there,
invested. The only time we would ever think of withdrawing it is, for instance, is like this, where we're paying down other debts just like an investment. If I'm paying 3% of my car loan, I had a little bit left on it. I just wanted to get rid of it. My last car loan, we paid that down. That's when I withdrew some money from it to pay that down. And then since then I've had all my debts paid off, saved up money in cash as well as put any extra money into this investment account.
Now, a lot of this is based off of line of work. And if you have the type of income that is irregular, so if you do like summer sales, you're going to have a lot more months where you get paid more than others. So on those months you should be depositing a lot more than others. And that's how I think it should go. When you have extra money, you got your tax returns, you're excited.
Instead of going out and just finding the next thing that that you want to buy, put some of that money, enjoy some of it, but put some of that money in your investment account. That's what I do, is you pay yourself first. I view this type of things, these scheduled deposits, as a must. I view it just like, you know, just like a new we got a new president in and he wants to raise taxes way up high and you just have to pay him.
There's no other choice. That's why I view depositing money at least a basic minimum amount to your portfolio. I view it like a tax or like I'm paying health insurance. Like it's just something that I have to do. So I pick a number that I can afford and then I say I'm paying that much every two weeks or every paycheck. And we figure out what to do beyond that.
And unless there is a predefined unexpected emergency, I'm not withdrawing it. And by an unexpected emergency, birthdays are expected, Christmas is expected. Those type of things don't count. Wanting to do some upgrades in the summer to your home, that's expected. I don't take money out for that type of stuff. I I put it in, I act as though it's, you know, it's not really my money anymore. It's my future money. I'm not going to rob future me
for the stuff I want to do now. That's how I've treated it. I would suggest that just find what number. If it's only $50 a paycheck, then start with that. Make it so that you put that 50 bucks in. Start somewhere, it might be a lot more for you. And then as you have extra money, just throw that in as well. Don't feel bad about putting that money in, even though a lot of people if they just try to
save money. I've noticed that that saving money for some people, and this is a whole different subject of like the psychology behind finance, because Dave Ramsey hits on this a lot. He hits on the behavior behind money more than the math behind it. Even though credit cards give you rewards. He talks about just going cash, that type of thing. I think that there's some behavior behind savings and
investing. I've noticed that I've had some people that are less financially they're, you know, the finance isn't their thing, they're not into that and they have a hard time saving money, right, Like most people. But I noticed that when I start them investing, for some reason they save up more money that way, even if the stuff they're investing in is close to a savings account like a lot of, it's just in bonds and fixed income securities.
The the disassociation of putting your money in the stock market for a lot of people makes it easier easier to actually build up large sums of money. If you're having a harder time saving and you notice that you just spend all the extra money you get, definitely put some of your money in the stock market each time. And and maybe not even just the stock market, put put some of it in bonds and different ETF's, I guess the stock market, but put it in in lower risk stuff that's
closer to savings. You can even put it in treasuries like I have some of My Portfolio in and that might help it so that it's easier for you not to spend it as soon as you find find something you want. Because the decision between just withdrawing money right from a savings account or actually selling securities you own, I think the implications are bigger for selling securities and you really have to think about it.
And that comes down to the things like this, where I really had to think about what I wanted to use this money for and I thought paying off the remainder of debt was a good use for it. And that's my $0.02 on it. Obviously you should have cash savings as well, but I do notice that there's some people that they now have more money in their a lot more money in their investment portfolios because it's easier for them to just out of sight, out of mind when they put the money in it.
The last thing I wanted to hit on was a Reddit thread and let me go to it here. OK so this Reddit thread he says how does M1 finance let you buy fractional shares? And as Q prime. He answers this pretty he answers it I think perfectly. But pretty much the way the M1 finance works I wanted to hit on this as well.
If I go to my holdings and I look at all these holdings, I have 26 point something shares on almost every one of them, 17.597 point 314.5 and a lot of people go, how does that even work? Like how do you own part of a share? How does that work with who really has ownership over the share? And the answer to that's pretty simple. The Clearing Corporation, which is like is a corporation that M1 Finance works with, the actually hold all of this money.
Apex Clearing Corp, What they will do is they will purchase the whole share, and then they give you legal ownership over the percentage that you purchase from them. As far as legally, you own this exact percentage. The same as if you own the whole thing. The same thing is you get the voting rights, you get a percentage of the voting rights, the dividends, you get a percentage of the dividends. So you actually do own the fraction of the share. It's not anything really, really
wonky. It's just the basics of just like how shares work, where you're buying a little fraction of the entire company. The same thing where if you're buying a fraction a fractional share, you're just buying a fraction of that share When they break down legally the exact same way. It's a pretty cool thing because it breaks up the prices of big expensive companies like Amazon and Google and and a lot of a lot of companies that would be difficult to dollar cost average into.
You can break them up with this. So that's the last thing I wanted to hit on. I'm thank you for everybody that keeps subscribing. I mean, it's crazy. We've had like 100 subscribers in just the past three or four days. Thanks for subscribing. If you haven't and you're interested in the content and want to keep up, make sure to subscribe and hit like and especially share the videos and things with other people. Yeah, I'll, I'll talk to you guys later. We'll see ya.