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Portfolio Update – November 2022

uehiFinance

Portfolio Summary

Here is a summary of my portfolio at the top level:

  • Raiz Aggressive Portfolio – $12,037.92 (2.92% according to app)
  • VDHG (using VPI platform) – $69,975.36 (0.86%)
  • IVV (Selfwealth) – $600.83 (11.32%)
  • SYI (Selfwealth) – $2,168.32 (9.32%)
  • VISM (Selfwealth) – $505.26 (-1.86%)
  • A200 (Selfwealth) – $2,084.71 (6.03%)
  • Cryptocurrency – $28,537 (-53.24% from principle)
A breakdown of my current asset allocation:
  • Australian Shares – 31.07%
  • Global Shares – 37.25%
  • Bonds – 6.75%
  • Fixed Income Assets – 0.3%
  • Cryptocurrency – 24.62%

Portfolio Total – $115,909.40. An increase of 5.51% compared to last month’s value ($109.851.39).

This month’s saving rate is 69.77%. I have stabilized my spending this month. The target for my spending is within my expectation. There’s still a bit of spending on gifts for my parents but these should be all right. I also try ordering more homemade cook from one of my co-workers, with the cost of $60 for 5-6 meals, and the food that she gives is massive. I was able to save a lot of money on deliveries, and only spend $6 a day for lunch. If my calculation is correct, my cost of food has been reduced by 40-50%, which is a massive cut. I also avoid having deliveries for dinner by having nut mix. I have this weird habit of eating and my mouth is always asking for a snack. I buy a couple of packages of mixed nuts, and this idea actually works. This month is a successful month for reducing my food budget, and I use that money to spend more on other stuff. However, things are not looking good in the next couple of months. I will explain this in detail in the last section.

My contribution for this month is on track with the new plan. $4,000 to VDHG ETF, $400 every 8 days for Bitcoin, and $100/week for my Raiz account. It’s the same boring month again. There’s not much news about the contribution plan, but there’s something I would need to consider – buying a cold wallet. With the collapse of FTX, I have been constantly worrying about my investment in crypto. I have enough experience to use a wallet, but the only problem with this is that I need to take care of it 24/7.  Till now, I have been thinking about it, at least to protect my investment in Bitcoin, and leave the rest on the exchange. Another piece of news is that I will not do any contribution for next month or the month after. I will need to spend a month of my salary on my holiday trip, even though I still want to keep going with my contribution plan. For the next couple of months, I will be in a rough position due to the uncertainty of my job.

Note: A reminder is that this number is still an estimation only as my crypto portfolio consists of different assets, including NFTs, staking, and Defi. I have to use other tools to keep track of and maintain the value of assets to finalize the final value of my portfolio. NFT is hard to estimate because of price fluctuation in the crypto market. However, estimation is still good enough in this case.

Events & Porfolio Analysis

Let’s start with the general news

  • RBA has increased the cash rate target by 25 basis points to 2.85%. With only 25 basis points, the market rallied on 01/11/2022. Seems like RBA is afraid of the sharp increase in interest rate could cause a disruption in the market.
  • Report for job openings surged in September – 10.72 million on 02/11/2022, but there are signs that the job market is slowing down.
  • Everyone waited for the meeting and expected FED to raise 75 basis points.
  • On 03/11/2022, FED raised another 75 basis points, the current rate is at 3.75%-4%, the highest since January 2008. Stock dumped hard, as well as crypto. In the meeting, Mr.Powell stated and I quote ““We still have some ways to go, and incoming data since our last meeting suggests that the ultimate level of interest rates will be higher than previously expected,” he said.
  • Job Report – nonfarm payrolls grew by 261,000 in October, better than the estimation for 205,000. This indicates a strong labor market. Therefore, FED can keep the rising rate without fear. Bitcoin broke above $21,000 after the news.
  • On 11/11/2022, the CPI report came out, increasing 0.4% for the month and 7.7% from a year ago, lower than the expected 7.9%. The market rallied, S&P rose 5.5% and the Nasdaq surged about 7.4%.
  • On 14/11/2022, Amazon reportedly plans to lay off about 10k employees.
  • On the same day, FED Vice Chair Brainard indicated that the central bank could slow the pace of its interest rate hikes.
  • On 18/11/2022, a report showed that the rental market is starting to cool off. This will affect the CPI number as renting is a big part of household consumption.
  • Another surprising news from FED – FED president James Bullard said that “the policy rate is not yet in a zone that may be considered sufficiently restrictive”.
  • On the same day, ECB announced that they would keep raising rates to put inflation under control, as the current inflation has gone to the 2-digits zone – 10.6%, far above the 2% target.
  • The turmoil FTX also brought down Coinbase’s share by 8% on 21/11/2022.
  • On 23/11/2022, FED minutes showed that smaller rate hikes could come soon.
  • A report on 26/11/2022 showed that consumers spent a record $9 billion online shopping during Black Friday even when inflation was still hot.
  • Protests in China because of the zero-covid policy, could affect the second-largest economy in the world. This can push inflation because of a shortage of supplies.
Crypto news
  • A German cloud provider, Hetzner Online GmbH has taken offline 1,000 Solana validators offline due to its new policy. This looks pretty bad for Solana.
  • Huge news between Binance and FTX on 07/11/2022 – there are many rumors about FTX that Alamanda Research is illiquid. CZ has announced liquidating the FTT on their books (around $584 million USD). The reason is to avoid the same LUNA incident that shook the crypto community.
  • On 08/11/2022, FTT’s price fell out of $22 support, which also tanked the whole market. Bitcoin has also dropped below $20k support, even though SBF has replied to the allegations. The reason why Bitcoin tanked, was probably not just because of FTX but also the macro-risks – election, upcoming CPI report…
  • Another bad news for the crypto market is that the legal case between LBRY and SEC has ended in the favor of the SEC. LBRY has been sold as securities. Don’t know how much this will affect the case between XRP and SEC.
  • On 09/11/2022, the price of Bitcoin crashed to $17,200, a new low. Lots of altcoins got dumped hard. FTX’s insolvency issues were the main reason for this meltdown.
  • On 10/11/2022, Binance walked away from acquiring FTX. A bank run happened, and they did not have enough money to cover the fund. Bitcoin dropped to $15,588, and people were freaking out and panic-selling. This is truly a black swan event.
  • On 11/11/2022, FTX suspended withdrawal, and SBF said sorry in tweets. Seems like no one would bail out FTX.
  • On 12/11/2022, FTX filed for bankruptcy, Bitcoin was dumped immediately and is currently at $16k. A lot of dramas and rumors around SBF. He also stepped down as CEO.
  • The shit show continues at FTX. The newly appointed FTX CEO John Ray, a former CEO of Enron (a large fraud company), has indicated that FTX is a complete failure. There was literally no control over the fund or the assets, just a bunch of kids doing what they wanted.
  • On 22/11/2022, another company – Genesis is about to go bankrupt. The mother company DCG is looking for a $1 billion investment to cover. Bitcoin dropped to a new low of around $15k.
  • With the collapse of FTX, BlockFi company files for bankruptcy Chapter 11 (companies love Chapter 11 nowadays) as well on 29/11/2022. Surprisingly, FTX also has a loan of $275 million to BlockFi. 
Well, this month’s theme is all about bankruptcy and filing for Chapter 11. I can still not believe that the domino effect on Terra Luna still lingers after 5 months. The collapse of FTX is now taking over the collapse of Luna. All of this happened in a span of a week, actually only a couple of days. I would not say this would not happen but the reason behind this collapse is just fraud and greed. Sam Bankman-Fried uses his own exchange token to push up the price, which appears in the book that they have billions of dollars in assets and this to me is just pure evil. The fact that the CEO of Alameda Research is basically gambling at this point. This event has caused another domino effect on the crypto market, which pushed the price of Bitcoin as low as $15,588 on 10/11/2022. Other companies like Genesis, BlockFi, and DCG got affected and are on the brink of bankruptcy as well. This looks pretty bad for the crypto market, as people use this as a way to attack and spread FUD even more. However, I truly believe that this market should be regulated. At least rules that will protect customers from situations like FTX. Others can say that crypto is dead, bitcoin is dead, well it could die, but who knows. This market has survived in the last decade with no help, and it still recovers. Let’s see what the future is waiting for us.
 
Not surprisingly, this month saw a decline in the crypto market because of the FTX event and the second factor is the exchange rate between AUD/USD. AUD is getting a bit strong again this month, hence when exchanging the amount to AUD, the total portfolio drops quite significantly. The total value of crypto is now back to the level of August 2022. To me, this is just another regular month for crypto. The collapse of FTX has affected all altcoins, especially Solana and FTX was the biggest backer of the project.
 
This month’s gain comes from the Stock portfolio. The most impressive gain is from Raiz’s portfolio. Last month it was -17.73%, but today it has grown to 2.92%, an impressive gain of $1,546.39. Well, the effort in DCA-ing to the portfolio for the last couple of months starts to shine I suppose. VDHG comes second as it has turned a negative growth of –4.71% to 0.86%. I believe part of this is because inflation is slowly coming back down. All the rate hike since the beginning of this year has been absorbed into different markets. The FED is also expecting to slow down the rate hike next year. We have seen a sharp increase from 0.1% to a 3.75% rate hike in just a year. If FED keeps raising rate hikes next year, there’s a high chance that we are going to see a recession for sure. Another indicator is the current massive laid off in tech companies. FED is interested in the job market and as long as the job market stays strong, the rate hikes will continue, but we are now seeing the job market slowing down. The market believes with this information, FED would slow down the rate hike in the future. Therefore, this month has seen a 5.51% growth in my total portfolio, which mostly comes from the stock portfolio.
 
Another good news is that I can see the % of the crypto portfolio has finally dropped below 25%, currently at 24.62%. I really want this number to be around 20% by next year. This is part of my plan to reduce risk in my portfolio. Once the 20% target has been reached, 10% is the next target. And the only investment for crypto atm is Bitcoin only.
 

Some of the articles I use for the information above:

Passive Income

This month has produced about 13.535 ADA. SOL and ONT rewards are small. BAT reward is 36.341 BAT. Staking reward for AXS for this month is about 0.279 AXS. Staking for IMPACT is 2718.97535 PACT.

To sum up:

  • ADA Reward – 13.535 ADA.
  • SOL and ONT rewards – the reward is not large enough to consider.
  • Brave Reward –  36.341 BAT.
  • AXS Staking –  0.279 AXS.
  • Impact Staking – 2718.97535 PACT
  • No dividend this month

What I have learnt

Keyword for this month – Disruption

I cannot believe that the company that I am working at has begun the massive laid off in the last couple of days in November. Bloodbath is literally everywhere. The worst thing was that they announced the laid off on freaking Friday. Who the hell does that, which ruins the weekend for most of the employees. Do you want to know what is worse than this, this happens 3-4 weeks before Christmas. This is just evil. I don’t know about the other employees but the reputation of the company is not great after this. This also affects my vacation plan as well. I was expecting to have a bit more money before Christmas to cover my holiday trip, but now I have to use my backup plan. Thank God that I have been working hard this year, both at my job and freelance. I have the opportunity to work freelance temporarily now while finding other jobs. I have been under a lot of stress this year due to the amount of work, but when I think about it now, it’s totally worth it. So remember, always have plan B, especially when you are a contractor.

This month has also given me a big surprise, a life lesson. After many years here in Australia, I finally got scammed, and the twist about this is that – I was the one who made the mistakes and was fully aware of it. I got the Vodafone scam call from a number (and I usually don’t pick up strange numbers) and on that day, I was extremely tired from work and my brain was not working properly. I picked up the phone and thought that it was probably from Vodafone. To be fair, the story that the scammer made up about I got some discount, which actually made sense since I also had just bought a new phone recently, so I thought to myself I would have missed the deal. The scammer asked for the PIN number and the OTC code. Now, this is where I gave the PIN and the OTC as well. By the time I realized, well they have successfully ordered a tablet to a location. I hung up the call quickly and rushed back home to call Vodafone to cancel. Luckily, they were able to cancel it and changed my PIN number. Though they could not have my information for the login (since Vodafone has changed their login to send a login URL to the phone number, which is more secure), I still had to change my credit card just to be safe. It was a good lesson.

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