Recent Buy: EPR Properties, CoreCivic & GEO Group

It’s been a while since my last real purchase in main portfolio but today there was three. Hopefully this wasn’t motivated by the negative news from Nordea Bank and Sampo. Both of which are slashing next dividend. First purchase was additional 15 shares of EPR properties bought for 79,46 USD per share. Nothing special here. Decent valuation and acceptable company profile given the interest rate environment and phase of the cycle. GEO Group and CoreCivic are much more interesting. Both are in the much hated for profit prison business which has taken a real beating as the US presidential election approaches. Personally I consider it extremely unlikely that a) US would elect really left leaning president such as Elizabeth Warren and b) would really move away from private prisons any time soon. Having said that, you never know what the general public does and therefore these come with high risk which is at least partly priced in. Very high yield above 10% is also reflecting it as a result. Therefore I bought 80 shares of CoreCivic for 16,17 USD per share and 80 shares of GEO Group for 16,09 USD per share.

Q3/2019 Results

Third quarter is over and this time around it was a bit special one. I decided to restructure my overall finances and paid off my mortgage. This operation involved some stock sales as well since the main motivation was to trim things into a more defensive position (keeping the investment debt carried in portfolio in low end of the allowed range). In global economy main risks are still in place as I expected. Recession risk is real but then again political decisions can easily cause big shifts in a way or another. I might increase cash position in fourth quarter but that remains to be seen. I’m also considering splitting the main portfolio between Nordnet and Nordea. This could be achieved by making additional purchases in portfolio hosted in Nordea.

Third quarter was quite solid considering all the global challenges. Dividend income was 1 337,50 USD and main portfolio value increased 5,45% during the quarter.