The universe has been aligned ever since I posted about my social media detox. With my new-found intention to start blogging more, I’ve been going down rabbit holes. 🐰

It started with (re-)discovering Neocities and finding cool internet concepts like a /now page.

It was 2004 when I first got embroiled in web development, making fan-sites for Habbo Hotel. Which led to me building communities, which then evolved to tooling and open-source.

I was following the trends closely, I was there when microformats and the concept of the indieweb got born. I however did not fully understand it as a teenager. I was just curious about the concept of data aggregation with microformats and getting better SEO in Google.

As you could see in my ROI stock series, I’ve been using Trading212 for a while now.

While it has some nice dashboards, I wanted more and since they offer a very nice CSV exporting feature, I decided to create my own Go-based tool to do aggregation and create a financial overview of my stocks.

💸 You can still use my affiliate link to get your own Trading212 account including a free stock of up to €100: https://www.trading212.com/invite/HrAs2dFZ

Header by Alan Levine CC BY 2.0

Go has made it easy to work with Unix operations, it comes with the platform-independent built-in package os to interface with the operating system.

They offer nice features such as os.Stdin and os.Stdout, wrappers of type os.File around the OS’s common standard streams.

The os/exec package is also great. It allows you to run Unix-tools from within your Go application.

Package exec runs external commands. It wraps os.StartProcess to make it easier to remap stdin and stdout, connect I/O with pipes, and do other adjustments.

💬 Read more

In november 2022 I left Twitter for Mastodon and I’ve been posting a bit there.

However, between work and parenting, I’ve noticed I didn’t have much time and most of all, I was getting imposter syndrome. I felt like I had to perform ’to be interesting'.

So I kinda stopped posting and interacting..

The same imposter feeling I got for my blog and website. However recently I’ve come around to that regarding the blog. I realised I’m mostly writing for myself; ‘cause it sure is interesting to read old blog posts from years ago. And as such, this actual blog post is an attempt to kickstart everything again.

A year has passed since my first post about my ROI stock portfolio and that means it is time to see how it went.

The portfolio

As of 10th of August 2023, using USD-based percentages, the portfolio looks like this:

In US Dollars this is a 14.4% return, which is not bad at all. Foreign exchange rates however gave me a -5% if I were to convert it to Euros straight away.

In a previous post about my ROI stock portfolio you could read what my plan was. We’re now 5 months further, and that means we’ve reached the halfway mark of the buying period. So how’s it going?

The portfolio

As of 10th of January 2023, just before I deposited another €100, the portfolio looked like this:

• ❌(-3.40%) Microsoft (MSFT) - ❌(-14.07%)
• ❌(-2.20%) Apple (AAPL) - ❌(-17.41%)
• ❌(-2.00%) Mastercard (MA) - ✔️(+5.32%)
• ❌(-3.93%) Qualcomm (QCOM) - ❌(-13.68%)
• ✔️(+0.72%) McDonald’s (MCD) - ❌(-3.06%)
• ❌(-1.36%) S&P Global (SPGI) - ❌(-5.01%)
• ✔️(+1.36%) Novo Nordisk (NVO) - ✔️(+13.02%)
• ✔️(+2.07%) Southern Copper (SCCO) - ✔️(+26.55%)
• ❌(-1.43%) Blackstone Inc (BX) - ❌(-17.91%)
• ❌(-1.65%) Paychex (PAYX) - ❌(-8.18%)
• ❌(-2.72%) Lousiana Pacific (LPX) - ❌(-1.89%)
• ❌(-2.32%) Rio Tinto (RIO) - ✔️(+14.96%)
• ❌(-1.36%) Vale (VALE) - ✔️(+17.29%)
• ❌(-1.42%) Applied Materials (AMAT) - ✔️(+4.07%)
• ❌(-0.27%) KLA Corporation (KLAC) - ✔️(+8.67%)
• ✔️(+2.79%) Vermillion Energy (VET) - ❌(-33.76%)
• ✔️(+0.55%) Crescent Point Energy (CPG) - ❌(-10.19%)

Volatile, that’s how it’s going. Just like the rest of the 2022 market. In fact, now with a couple of months of hindsight we can also see that my starting point, August 2022, was one of the ‘worst’ months to start.