Understanding An Investment Portfolio

From now on, we’ll be looking at my portfolio. What I’ll show you will be the holdings I have, how much I hold in each company and current position as of writing this. Posting this took longer than I wanted because I was waiting for a trade to complete. I wanted to give you a more holistic picture, but I think I was a little excited about the trade too.

Also, please do not see this in anyway as an endorsement, or me telling you what to invest in. These are my holdings, for my reasons, and I’ll be going through each one and why in a future post.
As of August 31st, 2020, here is my modest portfolio:

So, what exactly are you looking at here? Let’s break it down. The Code is the ticker that the company trades under. Think of this as a short-code for a company. When you say you want to invest in Air New Zealand, you need to know what name the company uses on the stock market. In this case, AIR is Air New Zealand, and the .NZ tells you what country the company or shares are located in.

Qty is the number of shares – so I have 2,125 Air New Zealand Shares. Cost Price is the price I paid per a share and its written in cents. This is something to remember and get used to when making trades. Cost Value is how much I paid for the total shares I hold. Market Price is how much each share is worth at this very minute as decided by the market. This is basically the current share price, and typically you want it to be higher than your Cost Price. Market Value is the current value of all your shares. Its calculated by market price times quantity of shares.

Unrealised P/L is how much you have gained or lost at the moment you’re looking at it. This is shown in dollars. Positive numbers means you have made money, negative numbers means you’ve lost money. Something to keep in mind is that this money is based on how much your shares are worth compared to how much you paid for them. This is not money in your bank account. Value (NZD) is the value of the holding and allows you to see the worth of each holding and the total portfolio.

Unrealised P/L (NZD), which is different to the one above, is a big column with a lot of info in it. Going from left to right it shows you what your profit or loss is, while the arrows show if it’s a profit or loss, and the percent shows how much of a profit or loss. Clear as mud? I thought so. Let’s look into it even further then, using AIR.NZ as the example. Air New Zealand’s share price at the time of writing this is $1.38, and I paid $1.45 per a share. This means I have ‘lost’ $148.75 on my investment, which works out to a loss of 4.8%.

Lastly, % of Portfolio shows how your total money is spread over your shares. Air New Zealand holds 22.84% of my total capital, for example.

Taking this all together, we get the end numbers – my total investment portfolio is currently worth $12,841.18 with a net profit of $662.23. Which works out to a gain of 5.4% on my initial investment. Had I invested this money into a savings account, I’d only be looking at about a 2% interest rate, so overall, this is not too bad… Even though you can clearly see the one stock that is tanking my P/L here.

As of writing this, I am waiting for another trade to complete which should add another $620 to the bottom line, but we’re not here to count future trades. This is as it stands.
In the next post we’ll dive into each stock – what it is, why I bought it, and what I have learnt from it.

August 31st, 2020
Current Portfolio : $12,841.18

And now I must put this in for the legal reasons…
I am not a financial advisor. All advice is taken with this in mind. I do not benefit from you using the same platform I do, or by using a different one. I do not have any insider knowledge of any company listed. Everything I will talk about – from the tools to the news – will be as available to me as it is to you. Again: I am not a financial advisor and never will be.