The Investing Lifestyle: My 3 favorite stocks

Introduction

I am not a financial advisor and this is not investing advice or investing tips. This is for entertainment purposes.

My portfolio is similar to many people working towards FI. I have a lot of index funds and I do love them. They are easy to invest into and they follow the market. It is essentially like putting your eggs in all of the baskets. 

Anyway, despite me loving index funds and mostly investing in those, I do have a few stocks I also invest in. Many of these are income-producing stocks or these companies have been around for a long time and I believe in their longevity.

Investing keywords to know

1. Stock symbol – An abbreviation used to identify a publicly-traded company.

2. Dividend yield – Expressed as a percentage. It is the ratio (dividend/price) that is paid out in dividends each year. 

3. Index fund – A type of mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks or matches a financial market index. They provide broad market exposure, tend to have low fees, and low portfolio turnover.

Disney $DIS

I grew up as a Disney kid, constantly watching their movies, loved visiting the parks. When I became an adult, I began to buy an annual pass because I used to go so often and it made sense to have one. I no longer have one as I am no longer living in Florida and it would not be worth the cost. The benefit of Disney is that they have a cult following, just like Apple, and Tesla. Which means they will most likely survive long-term. 

Disney is now less of a travel stock and now more of a streaming/entertainment stock due to the pandemic. Where they broke all sorts of records on subscribers and appear to be winning the streaming wars. Amazingly $DIS is up 140% from the 2020 lows, they also did away with their dividend. Which does happen sometimes, so it has been moved from a dividend stock to a growth stock. Normally, I prefer dividends as the only time you actually earn anything from non-dividend paying stocks is when you sell them, which I am not about that life. 

However, its time as a streaming stock will be ending once the parks begin to reopen again. Will they bring the dividend back? I am not sure but I would not hold my breath as they might allocate that money to new content for their streaming platform. Disney was already a big but adding a streaming service made them into a Goliath. 

AbbVie $ABBV

Maybe I love it because its ticker symbol is one letter away from Abba or it has a high dividend yield (4.47%). AbbVie is a biopharmaceutical company that develops, makes, and sells a wide range of pharmaceutical products for treating disorders. After merging with Allergan a few months ago, they now own Botox. Pretty cool, if you ask me. Normally, I like to buy stocks in items I use but I guess I might use their products one day. It is greatly beneficial that they now have this product, especially in consideration to the aging population we have in the horizon. As more and more baby boomers reach retirement age, we might see an increase in desire for Botox. 

According to Yahoo! Finance, the stock is 46.5% under valued at $108.00, and its intrinsic value is closer to $200.00. Will it rise that high? Perhaps one day but regardless, they have a strong balance sheet.

Realty Income $O

Since I cannot afford to buy a house for myself to live in, I cannot buy a house to rent out either. So, this is how I dip my toes into the real estate market. 

This is a retail-focused monthly dividend REIT that owns more than 6500 properties. They have a wide range of property types that are viable for different types of tenants – government, healthcare, shopping, etc. This makes it a large-cap stock, so you are mitigating your risk if there is a down-turn that affects the property values of one sector type of rentals. 

Do you want to start investing?

I use M1 Finance, where you create your own portfolio and when you deposit money it can be set to auto-invest. It will use your prescribed percentages. Click here for referral code.

Click here to see what my updated portfolio looks like.

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