I’m still in awe watching retail traders en masse push these stocks to highs or even new highs. It all started with Gamestock (GME) a few months ago and I was lucky enough to ride the wave for two days and GTFO. My wife wanted a piece of the action, despite my warnings, and bought a few shares at $350. It went to $500 in pre-market trading the next day and then promptly collapsed.

There are many reasons why I hold AT&T ($T) for my passive income goals. The first one is that it was around during the Great Depression and the second, it will probably be around during the next Great Depression. I can be pretty sure that AT&T will weather the storm if another future event like the Great Depression strikes the markets. Sure, all the stocks will drop in price, including the ones with dividends, but think of those skyrocketing dividend yields!

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about the Roaring 20’s and how they’re here now. I guess people are seeing a market near all-time records and are getting scared. Is 1929 right around the corner? Should you buy now? Sell? …and by passive I don’t mean lazy. What a great question! You know that there’s no right or wrong answer here. What’s my advice? Read this book (affiliate link) and then go do your favorite hobby.

This is my second monthly report on how my passive income journey to $100,000 a year is working. This month my passive income was a lot lower. QYLD didn’t have a dividend payout and RYLD’s payout is happening tomorrow. However, my Adsense experiment and Medium produced the most non-dividend income. The downside was that it wasn’t enough to exceed last month’s total income. Overall, I expect there to be blips and bumps along this $100,000 journey and that’s ok.

Today is the day I want to write about Johnson and Johnson ($JNJ) and why I’m holding it for the long term. One, it’s a well-established company that cranks out great products that everyone uses, and two it has amazing dividends. For each share of JNJ, you get $4.04 of dividends per year. JNJ hits all the sweet spots for building my $100,000 a year passive income portfolio. Let’s dig a bit deeper as to why.

Building a dividend producing passive income portfolio requires thought, time, and education. Today I’m sharing 5 tips for building a dividend passive income portfolio and how you can figure out the right strategy for you. As I’ve written before, this idea came to me after my wife and I reviewed her 401k at the end of 2020. She had by accident generated a large sum of dividends without even trying. This was the same for me in my 401k as well and we generated $800 in dividends by accident in our trading account.

It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance while the music was played. - Alan Watts I struggled with where to publish this article. Part of me wanted to post this to my regular blog Neural Market Trends because it’s where I’m writing about this particular subject a lot. The other part of me thought it would be best to share it on Medium with a larger audience.

Gamestop ($GME) has been in the news a lot lately and I’ve written three articles about it on Medium. It’s been an amazing thing to watch, the short squeeze that took short-seller Melvin Capital down (allegedly) and how crazy the r/WallStreetBets group is. I admit that I traded on all the activity and I made a tidy profit but I considered my success due to sheer luck and being at the right place at the right time.

Today I’m writing a short but important post for myself. It’s to assess how my passive income strategies are working and if I’m on track to building up a $100,000 passive income a year portfolio? Considering I ‘accidentally’ made $800 of dividends last year in my taxable account, I wanted to see if I could build up enough passive income before I retire at 59. Yes, I’m on track to retire by 59!

I continue to collect dividend producing stocks and ETFs on my journey to generate $100,000 a year in Passive Income. Earlier this month I picked up $RYLD, another covered call writing ETF that invests primarily in the Russell 2000. This one has a higher Beta though, so I’m taking on more risk but I’ve kept my initial purchase small. Stock Price RYLD is trading at its all-time highs. Everyone is thinking the Bull Market is getting a bit long in the tooth and are starting to wonder when the Biden bump will fade away.

My quest continues to earn $100,000 passive income in a year. Supporting my strategy is $QYLD, a monthly dividend producing ETF that uses a Covered Call strategy by owning and selling Nasdaq 100 stocks. It’s not one for the faint of heart, but it fits with my passive income strategy and I went long. There are two things that jump out at me risk wise. For my readers, I’ve written covered calls before, and they’re a great strategy to amp up your returns.

I added $GILT to my passive income portfolio at the beginning of 2021. I did it because the ex-dividend date was on 1/8/2021 and I saw that it had a low price with a history of big dividend payouts. Albeit it is a short dividend history. I’ve written that my goal is to build up a passive income portfolio. My measure of success will be when I generate a $100,000 a year income, and right now GILT is part of that strategy.

I spent the first week of 2021 reacquainting myself with Dividend Reinvesting and I’ve concluded that it makes a ton of sense for someone like me. Retirement isn’t here yet but I can see it coming on the horizon. I’d need to think about stabilizing my investments against volatility and start thinking of long term income. When I first started investing I put a small amount of money in Dividend Reinvestment Plans (still long INTC, thank you very much) and focused on growth inside my retirement accounts.

Building a dividend-producing passive income portfolio requires thought, time, and education. Today I’m sharing 5 tips for building a successful dividend passive income portfolio and how you can figure out the right strategy for you. As I’ve written before, this idea came to me after my wife and I reviewed her 401k at the end of 2020. She had by accident generated a large sum of dividends without even trying. This was the same for me in my 401k as well and we generated $800 in dividends by accident in our trading account.

I travel a lot for work, or rather I used to until Covid19 hit. My last work related trip was to Florida to a convention on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). I stayed in a beautiful Hilton Hotel near a marina with a great resturant and bar. I’ve been a long time Hilton Honors member and use the AMEX credit card a lot to gain points, status, and rewards. My Hilton Honors came in handy when my family and I were stranded overnight in Miami because flights were cancelled due to a nasty storm.

I invested in Terra Tech Corp (TRTC) back in January 2018. Marijuana / Cannabis type stocks were making big moves back then and this company looked like it would capitalize on it. At the time it was trading around the $4 to $5 range and I picked up 200+ shares of it for about $4.82. Since then I watched it do a reverse stock split and get put on the Pink Sheets.

Every year in November investors and traders look toward ‘Black Friday’ as a way to gauge how well the end of the year is going to go. Black Friday is the day that retailers and shops are supposed to finally make money for the year, due to heavy demand for ‘stuff.’ It’s too early to tell but I want it to be a good year. Wanting and what will happen are two different things in reality.

Now that Wall Street has accepted a Biden win, we’ll see more easing from the Fed and hopefully a great Santa Claus rally. That should be good news for stocks and for the ones in strong uptrends, it will be awesome! However for the ones in downtrends, well they get coal in their stockings. Here’s a tale of two worlds, NVIDIA’s performance vs Intel’s. Machine Learning and Data Science in general requires big computers to do data processing.

I picked up a few shares of XLE yesterday. I figured it was beaten down enough and should revert back to the mean, hopefully around $60. Update: Now sold… Chart wise I see two things happening. First, I see a window was opened when XLE fell off the cliff in March. I should probably do the statistics on it but the general wisdom is that eventually this window would be shut.

I went long $XLV in mid January 2007 for one of my personal IRA accounts. Its had its share of ups and downs but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or a fancy neural net, to figure out that health care is a long term bet. If you don’t believe me, look around for all the graying baby-boomers who want to desperately hold onto their youth. This time I’m holding XLV for a very long time and won’t be shaken out of it.

CMG is hitting an all-time high these days and after eating their tasty food, I can understand why. Good food at high prices is always a surefire way to make your stock a winner, until your fickle customers become cost conscience. My favorite dish is the chicken burrito bowl w/ sour cream and the red hot sauce. :) Update I posted about this stock back in May 2007 when it was trading at $82 or so and now, in 2019, it’s way higher.

Howard wants to buy put options on SMH. Me? I will wait and see which way she breaks from this narrow range, which started in mid 2005, before I do anything. Has it been trading in range for that long? My guess is that semiconductors aren’t the technology darlings they once were, maybe its because chips are more of a commodity now. Disclosure: Long INTC from years back. Update Here’s a perfect case for long term passive investing in an ETF.

I worked in my vegetable garden for most of the weekend and with every weed I plucked, the words “Ethanol” and “bio-fuel” kept popping in my head. I know that everywhere I turn, I see and hear about how Ethanol is going to save us from oil dependence and global warming. Despite my skepticism about Ethanol, I am curious to know what set of this new trend in the Agriculture index?

I’ve been following the China iShares, FXI, for a long time now and I noticed that Maoxian posted about it nearing its all time high. This reminded me of the time when the talk was that FXI might be overextended or possibly reaching a top. At the time, it sure looked that way. I even posted on my old site saying that the trend might be over but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if my initial call was wrong.

Sometimes trends have intra-trend reversals (which are great selling or buying opportunities) and then quickly resume their trends. Motorola tried to break free from their down trend, and almost succeeded with the introduction of their wildly popular Razr phone (I have one). With no new innovative product followup, MOT resumed its downward trend. Update Just over 12 years ago I posted about how [Motorola (MOT) was in a downtrend because it couldn’t come up with a new breakthrough product.

Could the trend party in IYR be over? Maybe. A lot of information can be gleaned from observing a price chart, mostly technical information. A lot of traders/investors forget that fundamental and sentiment information also drives prices up or down. Learn Stock Trading, Investing, and Risk Management There are a handful of financial and trading books that have made a HUGE impact on my investments. If you want to trade and learn about money and risk management that I suggest you get the Tharp book.

EWM was good to me in the past, too bad I sold it! Update EWM. What a great ETF for investing into the Asia area. This is one of those emerging market ETF’s that I should’ve held onto for the past 13 years. Once again I’m going to repeat what I wrote about passive investing: diversify, buy low cost mutual funds/ETFs, and dollar cost average. Look at EWM now, trading around $27.

My FXI neural net model continues to show an UP trend. Nice to know! :) Update I realize that after 13 some odd years, this one sentence blog post with a FXI chart is very much out of context. This post was a simple confirmation of a model I built for trading/investing in this particular ETF. This was the early days of my learning Data Science and boy was my model wrong from the start.