Posted by For the month of October, the DOW gained 4007 points. That is almost a 14% increase from the prior month, helped by speculation that the Fed will slow interest rate hikes. Interest and dividend income was $3,752 for the month. Withdrawals for living expenses came to $1,213 for October. YTD my investments are down by 11.57%. My only trade for the month was buying 50 more shares of FTXL at $50 per share. FTXL is the First Trust Nasdaq Semiconductor ETF. This is just averaging down in hopes that semiconductors will stage a comeback in 2023. There are a lot of good deals out there right now. Amazon is under $95 a share! There are 5900 stocks that are below their 52-week high. The majority are small and micro-cap stocks, but 177 of them are large cap stocks. Some of the names that are down over 50% are SHOP, PYPL, NFLX, SNOW, MRNA, ADBE.
Although some of these names went way up because of the pandemic, there are many that are down more than they should be. I already have many large cap stocks in the mutual funds that I own. Buying them individually would just duplicate my holdings. All of the mutual fund dividends in my retirement account are reinvested anyway. Since interest income has been improving, I made a change to reinvest dividends from NHMAX (Nuveen High Yield Muni Fund) which is down 14.56%. This fund is my only tax-exempt holding with a yield of 5.32%. It generates about $160 each month, which will now go toward buying additional shares. This one will continue to pay monthly dividends and should recover once inflation is under control. Another .75% interest rate increase would generate another $200 per month, which will make up for the money being reinvested into NHMAX. Income taxes for 2022 will be low because I won’t have any gains from stock sales. Unless I win the lottery, my taxable income will be well below the $12,950 standard deduction for 2022.