Grow Your Savings & Investments! (2024)

In December 2020, I decided to open up a new investment portfolio with M1 Finance and concentrate my stock picks on companies that seemed to benefit from Covid. But, first, I had to step back and think about who stood to benefit from quarantine. Some were obvious, like healthcare companies because I knew there would be a vaccine and others were less so, like pet care companies since everyone bought a Covid pet.

M1 Finance is an investing app offering both self-directed trading and automated investing. The app is free to use, meaning you won’t incur trading fees, and you can build a portfolio of stocks in what they call pies.

I created this portfolio on M1 Finance instead of just buying whole shares of stocks because I wanted an easy way to dollar cost average the price by investing every week, and maintain a well-balanced portfolio of companies. I didn’t want to pick just one healthcare company or one retail company if one flopped. So I set up my portfolio and selected 11 companies. I wanted to stop at 10, but I couldn’t decide what to drop.

Overall, I did well. I started this portfolio in December 2020 with $1000, and I have invested $25 every Monday since then. I’ve earned $60 in dividends and $353.24 in market gains, and my total return is 22.68%.

The stock market dipped recently, and while this portfolio fell like my others, it didn’t decline as much and rebounded much faster.

Portfolio Percent – 15%

Total Invested – $304.08
Total Gains in Dollars -$256.28
Total Percent Gain – 129.16%
Current Value – $560.36

Portfolio Percent- 10%

Total Invested – $197.94
Total Gains in Dollars – $129.01
Total Percent Gain – 77.41%
Current Value – $326.93

Portfolio Percent – 20%

Total Invested – $417.99
Total Gains in Dollars – $218.78
Total Percent Gain – 65.55%
Current Value – $629.43

The answer to the first question is that I have a few duds dragging me down. One of which is Facebook, which felt like a no-brainer stock when I created this portfolio. It had a long history of doing well, so I didn’t think it would bring me down, but it’s down almost 30%, representing 15% of my portfolio.

My other dud is Peloton, which is a bummer because I finally bought the bike! It’s only 5% of my portfolio (I kept it low because I knew it was risky), but it’s down 85.92%. I hope it gets bought out by Apple or Amazon, and the stock price shoots back up!

The answer to the second question is that I recently got a pay raise, so I will increase my investment to $35/week and adjust my portfolio by reducing the percentage of some of my lowest-performing stocks. My current portfolio is below, and you can find any future changes to the portfolio here.