June dividend income report and the Idorsia spin-off

It’s the end of the month so here’s my latest dividend income report!

June 2017 dividend income

• Unilever: 17.37EUR
• NVIDIA: 1.40EUR
• Hershey: 5.55EUR
• Moury Construct: 36.40EUR
• McDonald’s: 5EUR
• Royal Dutch Shell: 68.79EUR
• Gilead: 4.31EUR

In total that adds up to 138.82EUR in dividend income this month. As always, the figures I list are after all taxes and applicable fees. This is the fourth month in a row this year of triple-digit dividend income.

New purchases
Since my last report I added shares of Nike as well as AB InBev.

Actelion spin-off Idorsia off to a good start
As I wrote a couple of months ago, I bought shares of Actelion as a merger play. The company got acquired by Johnson & Johnson and shareholders got $280 in cash per share plus one share of the new spin-off R&D company called Idorsia. At the time I bought the shares it seemed like a good way to earn some cash plus get some free shares of a new company.

The offer was in US dollars so unfortunately the cash part worked out less favorable than expected due to the rising euro. Instead of a minor gain of a couple of percentages, I ended up with a 35.67EUR less than my original investment in Actelion.

Fortunately, it seems the new Idorsia spin-off is worth a lot more than expected. The company went public for 10CHF per share two weeks ago and is now trading at 17CHF! That’s a 70 percent gain in less than two weeks which tips the balance to a total gain of 4.3% for my four-month investment in Actelion.

Part of the astronomical rise is attributed to some large purchases. Actelion co-founder Jean-Paul Clozel (who now leads Idorsia) started with a 15.12 percent stake on the day of the IPO and has been using the cash he received from Johnson & Johnson to steadily increase his stake. According to the latest disclosure, Clozel and his wife now own 22.84 percent of Idorsia. Talk about a great vote of confidence!

Anyway, I now own 8 shares of Idorsia which I plan to hold for a long time. They’re not worth much at the moment but hopefully the company strikes gold with its R&D pipeline.

How much dividend income did you receive this month?

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Going solar?

So  yesterday’s green post from Amber Tree Leaves inspired me to write up a little green post of my own. One of my next investments this year may be solar panels. Over the past decade,  I’ve switched my position on renewables from a critic to a believer in the long-term potential of wind and solar energy.

Technological progress and scale of economies have dramatically reduced the cost of renewables. I’ve always considered 1EUR per Watt-peak an import psychological barrier and that’s roughly where we are right now for DIY kits as prices dropped to less than a quarter of what they were a decade ago.

Unfortunately, the payback time is still a bit longer than I’d like it to be. This is primarily because the Flemish government charges a big tax on solar installations that are connected to the power grid.

The position of our government on solar energy is pretty weird to say the least. On one hand the government wants a lot more renewables because of the commitment to the EU 2020 goals but on the other hand they’re heavily taxing residential PV systems to fill holes caused by over-subsidizing solar in the past.

During the solar boom in our country new installations were extremely over-subsidized in Flanders but now we’re in the opposite situation where there are no subsidies and owners of PV systems need to pay a tax to use the grid as a “battery”.  As in many other areas, government fucked up hard and created an unstable and uncertain investment climate.

Under somewhat optimal conditions, I think it’s possible for the PV system to pay back itself within nine years. But a lot depends on the future (and constantly changing) legal framework.

What green investments or other things do you do?