My Robinhood Stock Picks for September 2018

Now that September is over, it’s time to take a look at my Robinhood account and check on its performance. For those that are new to my blog, I’ve been making these monthly updates since my first full month of buying stocks on Robinhood in June of this year. That means this is the fourth post in the series.

How I Choose What Stocks to Buy

To recap, here’s how I choose what stocks to buy:

• Stock price must be affordable - under $100, maybe even under $50. This is because Robinhood currently does not support buying fractional shares.
• The company must be a company I believe in - in terms of growth, ethics, technology, innovation, etc. So, no Wal-Mart, no tobacco companies, etc.
• There is a slight preference to companies I use.

Progress

I’ve invested $441.00 into Robinhood so far. Unfortunately, my balance at the end of September was only $437.78. That means my balance has gone down by $3.22. It’s even worse if you take out the bonus stock I received from signing up for Robinhood - Chesapeake Energy valued at $4.49.

The good news is that none of this is a loss unless I sell. While I am doing this mostly for fun, I am in it for the long haul. Who knows if I even will ever sell!

My Picks

The stocks I bought in September are:

• Coca-Cola
• One Horizon
• GTx

While I’m more of a Pepsi product drinker (Mountain Dew to be exact), Coca-Cola is a bit more affordable - Coke stock is around $45 whereas Pepsi is over $100. I also enjoy Dr. Pepper, but I didn’t think to look at the stock of their parent company - Keurig Dr Pepper, valued around $20 right now. Maybe next (this?) month.

One Horizon and GTx are speculative buys. GTx stock was somewhere around $20. They are a biopharmaceutical company and recently had a massive product test failure, causing their stock to drop 90% to currently under $2.00. I bought one share for $1.80. One Horizon is a tech company; its stock was less than a quarter at 20¢.

Dividends

I made a whopping 92¢ in dividends in the past month across five companies:

• Kroger → $0.14
• Ford → $0.15
• Ally → $0.09
• GM → $0.38
• Navient → $0.16

While 92¢ doesn’t seem like much, I paid $117.15 for these five stocks. If you assume these were all quarterly dividends, that means I averaged slightly more than 3% for the dividend returns:

($0.92 / $117.15) * 4 = 3.14%

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!