First of all, I have to say that I am not giving investment tips or examples of how to invest money. This article is just to help me remember things for years to come when I wonder why I bought something. There will be (hopefully) more of these articles if I ever put money into anything that counts as an investment.
To start with, I could tell you the only investment tip I agree to give, invest only amounts and money that you can lose. In other words, don’t invest if losing that money means going hungry the next week or becoming homeless in a year.
Why am I writing this? Because I ended up owning shares for the first time in my life a while ago. One piece of advice I was given was to keep an investment diary. It is easy to forget purchase decisions and their justifications and turn them in your head something else that they really were. This way, when you write things down in a diary, you can easily check them later.
I have owned funds before. I prefer index funds. Some are low-risk, but there are also high-risk funds. For example, my S-bonuses go into a high-risk fund, from which I then transfer them to a lower-risk fund or invest somewhere else at the right time. The amounts are not large, but bonuses are the kind of “extra” money that is easy to put into investments without having to do anything yourself or even noticing.
posti
So what were those first shares? They are Posti shares, both normal and so-called bonus shares. Bonus shares are those that give you 10 more shares for every hundred shares you own, if you hold them for at least a year.
Why Posti shares? To be honest, it pretty much by feel , but also based on the fact that even though Posti has a bad reputation when you follow them on social media, it is still quite okay as a company. It is still largely state-owned and the state does want its share in dividends. The dividend will certainly not be as good next year as it was this year, for example, but it is probably not zero either.
Posti’s parcel business is profitable and also functional, although failures receive significantly more attention in the public and in social media than successes. The biggest ambitions for expanding abroad have also been buried for the time being, although if successful, that would also be a good option.
Letters are loss-making, but that side is decreasing all the time. Maybe it would make sense to separate letters and parcels? Leave letters to the state as a loss-making service paid for by society. This might be impossible at this point, it should have done years ago.
One big risk in the post office is the state. The state can decide both as the main owner and through legislation about the post office. Of course, a good government does not do anything stupid, but there are bigger targets than the post office that have been turned upside down because of ideology. This time, ideology gave me the opportunity to put money into post office shares. Time will tell whether the ideology was worth it and will eventually bring it down.
Dear (public investment) diary, part 1
Next came the participation in the next listing. I bought Framery shares. In my eyes, this was a much riskier purchase than Posti. The talk from people inside of the company was and is quite big. I followed the price development very closely in the first few days, my finger was constantly on the sell button. I did not sell.
Framery’s listing was a withdrawal of profits from parties that had previously invested in it. Quite a profitable one! If the promised dividend yield and growth are true, this is a really profitable investment. I do not trust those promises, and I also do not believe that in the long run “telephone booths” are what everyone wants everywhere.
The initial investors still remained a large part of Framery’s ownership, but at the same time made quite a good money by selling their own shares in the listing. According to some estimates, this is why participating in Framery’s listing was a risky choice. It may be, the first weeks of being on the stock market seems to be quite successful.
As with the post office, a fairly large part of the purchase decision was at the feel level, but I also read what others wrote and said about the company. Framery plans to distribute a significant part of its profit as dividends and still grow. A difficult equation in many ways, but apparently completely possible.
A large part of Framery’s products are exported. That is both a good and a bad thing. Exchange rates and the world situation can throw a lot of weight on a company. At the same time, you can’t rely on the situation of one country or even one continent, but you go up in one and down in another. Hopefully, overall, it will go up.
Telia
Then I go to the section “how does this investment really work?”. I transferred more money to buy Posti than I ended up putting in the post stock. I wanted to know how the dividends work and Telia’s dividend was coming out at soon and I decided to put a few hundred in Telia.
There’s really not much of a reason, other than the desire to know how the dividends work in practice. They work quite well. It’s the kind of stock that’s easy to throw money at anyway. A familiar, big company that operates in a pretty safe industry. You just have to keep an eye on whether the company goes after absurd things like those UMTS things in Germany again.
Polestar
This is almost like burning banknotes. I put a hundred here roughly on the grounds that the share was cheap and in fact it is now about 20% cheaper than what I bought.
In 20 years you might get good money in percentage terms, but there is also a pretty good chance that in six months that hundred will be gone. A lot depends on whether the Chinese Geely can and will keep pouring money into Polestar for long enough. At the moment it seems to be doing so, but will the nerves hold out long enough?
Polestar was in danger of being thrown out of Nasdaq because its share was too cheap, which is why the share was reverse split, after which the price has continued to fall, except for the last few days.
Polestar as a car is apparently qutie ok. The history with Volvo is not a disadvantage here. Is Polestar a good investment? At the moment I would say it is not. If I knew Geely’s desire as the owner to give money to Polestar, it would be much easier to say anything at all. Why did I invest in this? For fun and entertainment, and I believe in Polestar as a car. A single hundred won’t sway me at all, but I’ll definitely follow Polestar’s story and price more closely.
Finishing words
The sums are not large, and this article is not intended as investment advice or investment tips on any level. As I said at the beginning, this is just my own reminder for the future and for the entertainment of others.
Edit 30.12. There wasn’t any investment work there. Bittium appropriately issued a positive profit warning at the time when I had the shares in cash. I then bought a few shares of it. I was already considering Bittium before, but didn’t buy it then. The price has been rising quite briskly here for some time and the market value has multiplied compared to a year ago. The value is starting to be quite a multiple compared to the turnover, maybe too many. I will sell this fast if needed. This day brought almost 7% more.
The owner base seems to be quite large. There are also pension companies and investment funds. Only one has significantly reduced its holdings, a few less and the same thing with the increase.
This was by feel purchase if anyone, but I don’t have much money in Bittium. Sell it at some point and curse that I didn’t buy more or watch your money disappear like smoke, that’s what this is! In big picture a much better option would be to put the money in an index fund than directly in shares.
