My Robinhood Stock Picks for November 2018

This sixth monthly edition of “My Robinhood Stock Picks” will probably be the last for a while. With my recent purchase (and financing) of a minivan, as well as the fact I have a more tax-advantaged Individual 401k to put money in that I’ve nowhere near maxes out, I think my money has better use elsewhere.

That said, I’m not closing my account. Nor do I intend to withdrawal any dividends I receive in my Robinhood portfolio. In fact, I may modify this series from a “stock picks” series to “stock performance” series. I haven’t decided yet.

Progress

In total, I’ve deposited $490.37 into my Robinhood account. At the end of November, the balance in my Robinhood account was $483.13. That’s a loss of $7.24, or about 1.5%.

Of course, part of the reason I’m down is the money I lost playing with options back in August.

The other reason I’m down is just the fact the market seems to be in a decline (or bear market) right now. Of the 26 stocks I own, 19 are worth less than what I paid, leaving only the remaining 7 to be worth more than what I paid.

My Picks

Onto the meat of this post. What stocks did I buy in November?

Before I go into what stocks I bought, let me describe my current portfolio (beyond even just Robinhood): heavily invested in traditional stocks, with a small portion in bonds and an even smaller portion in cryptocurrency. I have little or no exposure to real estate.

So I looked for what are known as REITs. REITs, or Real Estate Investment Trusts, are companies that invest in (typically by owning and operating) real estate.

Are REITs stocks? Well, you can own stocks in companies that are REITs. Sometimes people consider REITs to be a different investment class that traditional stocks, but REIT stocks have the same statistics as normal stocks (e.g. market cap, price-earnings ratio, dividend yield) and you can even trade REIT options. There are even private REITs (i.e. not publically traded).

If you made it through the last few paragraphs, then it’s obvious at this point I bought at least one REIT stock. In fact, I bought two:

• New Residential Investment (NRZ)
• Global Medical REIT (GMRE)

Why these two? Their price was relatively low - about $17 and $10 respectively - which mitigated my loss. Both had a 100% rating on Robinhood, so it felt as if it might be a good buy. And my short research into the companies didn’t find any significant moral lackings.

About that 100% rating on Robinhood. For each (or most) stock on Robinhood, that percentage is the percentage of analysts that say this stock is a buy.

I actually found the 100% rating suspicious. I’d expect maybe something in the high 90%, but not a perfect 100%. It turns out that these two stocks have a lower number of analysts than other stocks. For instance, Verizon has a total of 30 ratings. NRZ only has 7 and GMRE has 6. This means it’s easier for the rating to get a perfect 100%.

Another suspicion of these ratings is who are the analysts? Unfortunately, I couldn’t find out exactly, but from what little I could gather, the analysis comes from the Wall Street Journal.

Dividends

My favorite part of the stock game - dividends.

Options would probably be funner (more fun?) if I could consistently pick winners, but until I can invest with a time machine, that’s not going to happen.

I received 75¢ in dividends with two different companies:

My return isn’t too bad, especially with Verizon. It’s the only two of these that the stock price has gone up. And it’s nice to see that Ally’s return is higher than their current savings account rate (2%), otherwise, the money would’ve done better sitting in an Ally savings account.

Remember!

This money is money I can afford to lose - when I buy any stocks or options, I automatically assume a complete loss, at least as far as my budget goes.

Want your own free stock from Robinhood? Sign up using my Robinhood Referral link!