My brokerage account on Charles Schwab currently consists of 21 different holdings, but I’ve had a craving to do some consolidating for a while now.
However, for a die-hard dividend enthusiast like myself, parting ways with a stock is never easy. We dividend investors typically buy with the intent to hold forever – or at least until the dividends stop flowing.
With that said, it’s easy to get attached to the stocks you hold, but it’s also important to know when to fold ‘em and I’ve identified four stocks that I wouldn’t mind saying farewell to, which I’m telling you all about here.
Among these four is $JEPI, a covered-call ETF boasting one of the loftiest yields in my portfolio.
I started buying this fund maybe about a year after it came onto the market in 2020. At the time, covered call ETFs were all the rage. They were the “hot new thing” everyone was talking about, and you couldn’t open up YouTube without seeing at least one video talking about them.
So, I figured I would test the waters with $JEPI. I put a little bit of money into the fund to see how it performed, and I’ve gotta say, $JEPI has pretty much delivered on the fund’s objective.
Truth be told, I don’t really have any serious qualms with the fund and have been content with its performance. At the same time, this is something I’d never make a large portion of my portfolio, and I’ve always known that $JEPI wasn’t a “forever” hold for me.
Because of that, instead of continuing to have my money tied up in the fund, I would now rather use that money to build a more meaningful position in something I actually care about, even if doing so comes at the expense of less dividend income in the short term (which would likely happen since $JEPI is one of the highest yielding positions in my portfolio).
Having said that, the fact that I’m considering selling out of $JEPI at all calls into question whether it was a mistake to invest in the fund in the first place, and I don’t think it was at all.
At the end of the day, investing is a journey of discovery and perpetual learning, and sometimes there are just things you have to learn the hard way.
In doing so, you might end up making some investments that don’t quite fit the bill, but that ultimately might be what it takes to discern the positions that are truly worth holding.
Plus, I’m still up about 5.5%. At the end of the day, $JEPI was a lesson I was paid to learn, and you can’t beat that.
What was the last stock you sold out of in your portfolio, and why did you sell it? 🤔
