For the last few months I’ve been building a new service with @Jack Bowman, a portfolio manager and investment advisor who writes The Macro Obsession newsletter and ranks in the top 5% of experts on TipRanks. Jack is also a fellow analyst over on Seeking Alpha.
When I started this newsletter, I always wanted to provide value that went beyond articles. I think ETF Portfolio Mechanics will be a natural extension of this by giving you guys the ultimate ETF toolbox.
Most of us own several ETFs that look nicely spread out on a brokerage screen, but underneath they often lean on the same handful of companies. The tools we built let you enter ANY combination of funds you own and see every stock underneath, how much of your total portfolio each one makes up, and what your projected dividend income is, so you know where your money actually sits before you buy more.
ETF Portfolio Mechanics allows you to be the mechanic of your own portfolio. The basket of tools will allow you to dig deeper into each fund and construct your portfolio will precision.
It will launch as a Seeking Alpha investing group for do-it-yourself ETF investors, and it opens to members in early November. Jack runs the macro and growth side, I run the income side, and together we take the most widely held U.S. funds apart holding by holding every week, with real-money portfolios built on what that work finds.
If you’ve been reading Dividendomics for the income funds, this is where I’m putting the deepest version of that work. Here’s what you’ll get:
Three crafted income portfolios - Choose by which yield profile you want.
Jack’s Growth Portfolio
A weekly Dividend Monitor
A weekly Macro Monitor
Expansive Toolkit - covered below.
It is an ETF-only service, though, so it doesn’t cover individual stocks, CEFs, BDCs or REITs directly, and if those are the core of your portfolio you should know that going in. Something that I learned is that all income investors don’t want the same thing; some want to maximize the income received, while some want capital appreciation as well.
So instead of one portfolio there are three, ranked by yield, and you pick the one that matches your goal when you open the page. I own stakes in ALL OF THESE PORTFOLIOS, so I am incentivized for these setups to do well going forward. Each portfolio will be actively managed, so expect tweaks over time as market conditions shift.
The Tools Inside The Member Site
I never wanted this member to just be about articles. There are tons of services that only offer information, which you can get for free nowadays. The idea here is that you have a toolkit that you can depend on for everyday research. YOU can become the own mechanic of your portfolio and the clear visuals makes it easy to understand the flow of money within your portfolio.
Membership comes with a password to the member research site, and these tools answer the two questions I care about most as an income investor: how much of my money is sitting in the same few companies, and what each month is going to pay.
So let’s take a quick preview of the features available.
Portfolio X-Ray works with any mix of funds. You import or paste up to 20 ETFs, and it shows every position underneath, sized by its share of your whole portfolio and colored by the fund that contributes the most. You can also enter a proposed allocation and compare it against what you own before you make a change.
Income Hub ranks dividend, option-income, and alternative-income funds by distribution rate, repriced daily, with the trailing twelve months shown beside each one.
Income Planner turns your income funds into a twelve-month payment calendar with planning ranges, so you can see which months run heavy and which run light before they arrive. Import your positions and get an accurate output of what your monthly dividend income will look like.
Then there's ETF Research for opening up one fund, ETF Compare for putting two side by side with their overlap and fees, and ETFs by Holding, where you pick a stock and see every ETF that holds it and at what weight.
For instance, maybe you want to see how SCHD 0.00%↑ and VYM 0.00%↑ compare to one another? You can get a direct breakdown of any combination of ETFs like this. You can see how the holdings compare, the dividend growth, and even the internal health of the companies they hold.
What Lands In Your Inbox Every Week
The thing I wanted most from this was a schedule you can plan around, so we locked one in before launch. Every piece has an owner and a day, and you’ll know what’s coming before you open the email. The best part is that users can specifically suggest funds that they want coverage on. Have an ETF you want to know more about? Submit to us and we’ll publish coverage on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
How To Join
Membership runs through Seeking Alpha’s Investing Groups with one checkout, and you do not need a Seeking Alpha Premium subscription to join. Once you’re in, you get a welcome email with the member-site password and your first piece on the next publishing day.