Everyone that follows even a bit the news knows that September has been an awful month for the financial markets in general.
Just to give some references, first you have the S&P 500 hitting the new low of 2022 towards the end of the month. Then, you have UK annoucing a new fiscal plan that many fear will drive up inflation and - as a consequence - interest rates. On the other side of the world, China is struggling with its housing bubble (many predict it will soon burst but to be fair this prediction has been around for a while) and its COVID Zero policy. Last but not least, the war in Ukraine has no end in sight.
In all of this mess, I just did what I always do - buy 2700 Euro worth of one of the 3 geographical ETFs in my portfolio, this time the European one (iShares Core MSCI Europe). Extra costs are piling up and I need to rework the math of how much I can afford to invest every month but in September I strecthed myself to keep the contribution high. Overall, investing in a downturn like this can expose you to quite some nice upsides as the economy and the market recover.
So, September has been awful - but just how awful? You can judge for yourself by looking at the numbers below. Losing more than 20,000 Euro in one month is probably a new record since the beginning of this series.
Considering that over time I have invested 231,532 Euro and now all of that is worth 233,472 Euro, it is pretty easy to understand how close I am to the break even point. In the middle of August I had a 39,000 Euro difference between these two numbers! Puff!
Am I upset? Actually no, remember that my time in the market is still relatively short. As long as you have a solid emergency fund that can cater to unexpected expenses, you too should not be upset about this.
That said, the dividends were very nice in September, totalling 925 Euro in the month. Chief contributor to this was the Emerging market ETF (475 Euro) - considering how bad this has been performing in the last period I am happy at least the dividends keep coming. Three other ETFs make up for the rest of the amount is an almost equal fashion.
The total for 2022 is now at 3,318 Euro.
Overall, in the last 12 months I was paid out on average 317 Euro a month worth of dividends.
October will be a weak month in this area but November and December should pick up again.
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