This is my forth Quarterly report. You can check out my previous quarter report and I hope you enjoy my current Portfolio Quarterly earnings report quarter 3 2020.
The idea of this post is to show my active and passive income streams and highlight the profit and loss statement, the investments done and the returns. In parallel to this, I will mention the challenges faced and the decisions I took to overcome them.
If you are reading an older post, but want to check my progress towards my goals, then you can check my passive income goals or just check out my monthly updated portfolio. If you are interested in the passive income article, just click passive income in the menu.
Contents
Active Income
Consulting Firm – My consulting services
As you may know from my previous report, the revenue and scope of my business is not something that I am currently comfortable to disclose. This is still my bread and butter (>90%) of revenue and I must respect my customers and my company’s confidentiality.
The main update on this regard is that I may lose one of my major clients and settle for another one due to cost restrictions faced by my customer. This will mainly mean a 40% decrease in my consulting income, thus the hardest financial hit for me and the family in 2020. This means that we need to look at cutting costs as we are not near our desired targeted.
On this area, I have extended my domains for 5 years in order to secure them and remove this cost from future expenses. This was a cost that went on top of SEO services and let me to a total cost of 276 EUR. This is ~150 EUR less than the prior quarter and I intend to bring it further down. I will continue with minimal business promotion and improvements and I hope that I will find some more time to put into my YouTube channel as all my articles that have associated You Tube videos improve my consulting firm blog SEO where I had +1k clicks and +36k visualizations.
As for my eBook sales, since I transferred to PayHip I have a profit of 29 EUR and managed to get the below statistics for this quarter. This is 1 more sale versus the previous quarter performance.
Personal Blog
I still have no revenue from the blog. This is currently only generating a cost which I expected as the initial investment. I am still keeping this blog separate from my main business one and as I do not have a proper reader base for now (22 subscribers). I do not expect to gain revenue from the blog, but I hope to start increasing the number of readers during the next months.
By the way, I stopped posting progress on the weight loss as I did not do anything relevant there. I need to shape up and start fixing that soon.
The total cost for the blog was of 112 EUR for this first quarter and I intend to further bring this down. So far it is 1 EUR higher than in last report, but this also included the extension of the domain for 1 more year. I had +11 clicks and +1k visualizations versus the last quarter. Peanuts compared to the consulting blog.
| What | EUR | Comments |
| Ads | 0 | No ads on blog for now |
| Affiliate | 0 | Nothing so far |
| Donations | 0 | No donations button on blog for now |
| Total Revenue | 0 |
This means that I am currently at a loss of 388 EUR with my company’s website and personal blog for this quarter, this is a cost reduction of 200 EUR compared to the previous report. All I can say is that my domains are paid for and my SEO is gradually slowing down for both.
Passive Income
Paying off Debt
As you remember from my active and passive income streams article, I consider paying off debt a good part of my passive income. Why? Simple – reducing the amount paid in loans increases the amount invested.
There was no further prepayment on the mortgage this quarter, but the money is there and waiting. Due to the pandemic, we decided to play it safe and further wait with prepayment on the mortgage until things are a little bit more stable.
The only change here is that we are considering selling some stocks and using them as the prepayment on the mortgage. As the winter is coming in both EU and USA, we are concerned that our current gains will be impacted by COVID-19. A safe bet would be to use part of that money as an advance payment on the mortgage and at least get it off our chests.
Stock and ETF investments
The core of my passive income is my investing. This is the area towards which I want to allocate most of my savings and go long. As my strategy is buy and hold, I can easily flag this under my passive income stream. During this quarter I added MRVL to my portfolio and nothing much of interest happened. In August I has at a nice unrealized gain, but now it went further down due to the fluctuating market. The Experiment had some better days in August, but at the end of the quarter it still looks good, with a total unrealized gain of +750 EUR versus last quarter and these are some stocks that I am thinking on selling to prepare to prepay the mortgage.
Considering the loss of Etergo I have a loss of 4167 EUR linked to that, but the law suit discussions are ongoing. This does not lead to any change in my existing portfolio versus last quarter for the VC investment. As for the stocks, we live in a very fluid market and I am getting used to the fluctuations. Thinking to sell when we have the next high in order to protect myself against the incoming winter in EU and USA.
Venture Capital investments
| Symbol | Position | Currency | Market Value |
| Carwow | 447 | GBP | 1,500 |
| Total | EUR | 1643 | |
| vs previous Q | EUR | – |
Single Stocks and ETFs
No major change here, I sold TLRD at a 90-95% loss due to their bankruptcy and bought MRVL as a new addition to my portfolio.
| Symbol | Currency | Market Value |
| 2343 | HKD | 4599 |
| 4GLD | EUR | 2574 |
| AAPL | USD | 4489 |
| AEO | USD | 286 |
| AIR | EUR | 1824 |
| ATVI | USD | 1610 |
| BABA | USD | 2709 |
| BIDU | USD | 1233 |
| BMW | EUR | 1195 |
| BRYN | EUR | 3620 |
| CGG | EUR | 100 |
| CLF | USD | 294 |
| COKE | USD | 2394 |
| CSEMUS | EUR | 1921 |
| CSSPX | USD | 6567 |
| CVET | USD | 689 |
| DPW | EUR | 1144 |
| DRO | AUD | 1683 |
| EQQQ | EUR | 2818 |
| EXK | USD | 341 |
| EXS3 | EUR | 898 |
| FCU | CAD | 482 |
| FCX | USD | 1538 |
| GCM | CAD | 263 |
| GILD | USD | 622 |
| HLX | USD | 506 |
| INRG | EUR | 331 |
| IWDA | EUR | 2713 |
| MCD | USD | 1308 |
| MEUD | EUR | 1781 |
| MRVL | USD | 952 |
| MTCH | USD | 528 |
| MVOL | EUR | 1719 |
| NCU | CAD | 612 |
| NEE | CAD | 601 |
| NESN | CHF | 1097 |
| PVG | CAD | 354 |
| RADA | USD | 1534 |
| SXRS | EUR | 1913 |
| TDW | USD | 209 |
| TNOW | EUR | 2627 |
| URG | USD | 272 |
| UUUU | USD | 393 |
| WSML | USD | 1507 |
| XOM | USD | 692 |
| Cash | AUD | 0 |
| Cash | CAD | 8 |
| Cash | CHF | 17 |
| Cash | EUR | 412 |
| Cash | HKD | 84 |
| Cash | USD | 149 |
| Total Invested | EUR | 56161 |
| Total Market Value | EUR | 58183 |
P2P Lending
I am still keeping my previous point that during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have noticed that governments tend to lower interest rates and try to boost the economy. Besides this, there are a lot of people who become unemployed and several sectors are badly hit financially. As most of my loans are either on real-estate or on small loans, I start to lose confidence in the lenders ability to guarantee them as more and more borrowers will have to postpone their payments. Due to this, I am currently holding any investments into P2P until next spring. I want to see how things move through the winter for my existing investments in Mintos and Crowdestate.
I am still waiting for the bankruptcy investment that I have with Crowdestate as the proceedings were delayed several times. Looking forward to see how this ends up.
The below are the overall statistics, but when comparing to the previous quarter, this one I made 44 EUR. Please keep in mind that this is after I pulled out of P2P lending.
Sell eBook online
Not a lot to say here, in total I sold 3 more eBooks and did no relevant changes. The profit from this is tracked with my consultancy firm chapter. For the eBook, I have the below statistics:
And for the free sample (1st chapter of the eBook), I had only 15 interested clients:
Affiliate marketing
At this point in time I do not have the actual time, nor the willingness to invest a lot in affiliate marketing. The only improvements I have done here was to add some banners on the side bar for P2P lending, Hosting and Fiverr. You can check them out or you can just go to my Resources page to see all the items for which I am an affiliate.
YouTube videos
Last, but not least is YouTube. I have already hinted to this in a previous chapter, but I am happy to say that I have +3 subscribers and +11 public hours of videos watched compared to the previous report.
Last month I have created an Instagram page for my cats. I am currently trying to gain followers to see if my cats can become influences. If you love cats and want to check them out, just go to Amazing5Cats or just check out the image at the end of the post.
So far, I have ~5000 followers, but most of them were made by following other people. As I reached the 7500 cap of following, new followers are obtained very slowly.
Conclusion
In order to conclude my Passive Income Portfolio Quarterly earnings report for Q1 2020, I have listed below the overall profit and loss across all mentioned segments.
| + | – | |
| Company | 0 | 1,422 |
| Blog | 0 | 187 |
| VC | 0 | 4167 |
| Stocks/ETFs | 8191 | 0 |
| P2P Lending | 1900 | 0 |
| eBook | 59 | 0 |
| Course | 0 | 0 |
| Affiliate | 0 | 0 |
| YouTube | 0 | 0 |
| 10,150 | -5,776 | |
| Bottom Line | 4,374 |