Inside My $144,500 Dividend Stock Portfolio | AUGUST UPDATE 📊

So guys, the new month is officially upon us, which means that it's time for another dividend portfolio update. And I'll tell you what, last month was pretty dang volatile. A lot of choppiness in the portfolio. But ultimately, we made out pretty well. Anyway, in this video, we're going to get all caught up to speed, and I'll show you everything like my best and worst performing stocks for the month, all of my recent moves in the portfolio, and we'll discuss what my plans are here in August. Before we get into it though, in case you're new to the channel, my name is Ryan and here we strictly talk about dividend investing and how you can use it to create passive income and reach financial freedom. So, if you love dividend investing and if you're on a mission to retire early, then hit that subscribe button. We are inching closer and closer to 100,000 subscribers by the day. And I'd love to have you along as we continue to grow our portfolios and collect that cash flow. Also, real quick, guys, I want to hear from you. Leave me a comment below and let me know what's been going on in your portfolio this past month. Were you up? Were you down? Did you hit any crazy milestones in your portfolio? Anything cool that happened to you guys? I want to hear all about it in the comments below. All right, guys. Now, getting into how my portfolio performed this last month over here on my dividend portfolio tracking spreadsheet, which you can start using for free to track your own portfolio. There's a link to download this spreadsheet in the description of the video. I hope you check it out. And what we're looking at here is just my main taxable brokerage account over on Charles Schwab. And as we can see, it is currently valued at $111,591. And over on the income side of things, every single year, this one account is generating $3,888 in dividends. Now, comparing both of these numbers to the same time a month ago, we made gains in both departments. Just looking at the account value, we added almost $1,000 to the taxable account just in the past 30 days. So, some nice gains there. And over on the income side of things, we added $62 in projected annual income, which in the taxable account, I think is a pretty big month- over-month jump in income. But it makes sense because we had a lot of higher yielding stocks pay dividends last month, like KRC, Main Street Capital Corporation, Realy Income, Blue Owl Capital Corporation, Vich Properties, WP Carry, Watskco, all higher yielding stocks. And when those got reinvested back into the portfolio, it added a nice little boost to the income. And with that said, guys, if we look at the breakdown for the month over here on Snowball Analytics, which outside of my free spreadsheet, this is hands down my favorite portfolio tracker. And if you're looking for something with, you know, more bells and whistles than your standard spreadsheet, I highly recommend you check out Snowball. And you can actually do so for free in the description of the video. There's also a link to this and you can check it out with a twoe free trial. Anyway, back over here on Snowball. In the month of July, I added 8/10en of a percent to the portfolio. So, a nice little jump there. It wasn't my best month. wasn't my worst month in 2026. Pretty middle of the road. And if we scroll up just a little bit, like I was saying earlier on in the video, there was a lot of choppiness, a lot of volatility in the portfolio throughout the month of July. And we can see that here. I mean, I was up 2 and 12% at one point, then I dipped back down to basically break even and then soared all the way back up to a peak of almost a 3% gain throughout the month, which was pretty sweet. But then the last, you know, couple trading days in the month of July, we saw another little pullback, which, you know, landed us up 8/10en of a percent overall. And with that said, if we compare my portfolio's returns to those of the S&P 500 to the NASDAQ into SCHD, I think we made out pretty well. We definitely beat the S&P this past month. Same with the NASDAQ. The NASDAQ was down 6.4%. Pretty big drop there, but we did underperform SCHD, which had another killer month, up 5 12%. With that said, this is where things stand year to date. My portfolio is up 9.3%. Not too bad. Just barely behind the S&P, which is up 9.8%. Looks like the NASDAQ's up 11.4%. pretty strong performance there and SHT still just continues to crush it. Up 22% for the year. So overall guys, July was certainly more good than bad. But I'll tell you what, I had a couple of stocks in particular that took some absolute beatings, which is what we're going to be taking a look at next. [music] All right, guys. Now getting into my best and worst performing stock for the month. By far, Chevron was my top dog in July. The stock was up almost 19% just in the past 30 days. So, some incredible performance there, which is going to leave Chevron up 26.2% year-to date. Looking good. Moving on, my second best performing stock, believe it or not, was Zoetas. Finally, Zoetas has a good month. It was up 7% in the past month. Year to date though, that's still going to leave the stock down about 38 1.5%. But we're making progress, I'll take it. Then, in addition to those two, Main Street Capital Corporation also saw some decent performance in the past month. The stock was up about 5%. the share price is now making its way back up to the mid50s. But year to date, if we look at the performance, Main Street still down close to 12%. So overall, you know, still seeing a drop for the year. But anyway, those three did pretty well for me this past month. And now on the other hand, like I said, there were a couple of stocks that just took some crazy beatings with my biggest loser for the month being at none other than Watskco, who was down a whopping 24% just in the past month. It was a crazy drop. We saw the share price go from almost $410 per share to where it's at now, $310. Crazy crazy crazy to see year to date. That's going to leave Watskco down about 10.6%. Now diving into this a little bit deeper, the reason for Watskco's big drop this past month just came back to their quarterly earnings. As we can see over here on the chart, they missed their earnings estimates by 9%. So analysts were expecting them to generate $4.40. They only generated $4 in earnings per share. And to add insult to injury, this was also a year-over-year decline in earnings. This time last year in Q2 2025, they generated $4.52. So year-over-year, that's about a 12% decline in earnings per share. Along with the drop in earnings, gross margins also fell about two percentage points as the company wasn't able to benefit from the favorable pricing they were getting this time last year in the midst of the A2L refrigerant transition. So that pricing normalization also had a negative impact on Watsco in the quarter. Now jump on over here to Simply Safe Dividends, which you can also check out for free. There's a link to try this out with a one month free trial in the description of the video. That's very generous. This is a fantastic platform. I think this is a must have for dividend investors. So definitely check out that trial. But looking at Watskco's dividend yield right now with that drop in share price, it has just completely soared and is now sitting at 4.27%. Very, very juicy yield, which is way above the average of 2.8%. I think Watskco is looking like a fantastic buy right now, and I might have to start adding a little bit to this one. And if we look at the 52- week price range right here, it is way down there at its low. So, it's a good time to buy. Anyway, moving on. Another stock that saw a crazy drop for me this past month was Rollins. The stock was down almost 10% just in the past 30 days. It is now below $40 per share, which is crazy to see. And year to date, that's going to leave the stock down 35.7%. Now, similar to Watskco, the big reason for this stock's decline just comes back to their quarterly earnings. And as we can see back over here on this chart, they also missed earnings estimates. Looks like analysts were expecting them to generate 34 cents per share in earnings, but they brought in 32 cents. So that's a 6% miss. With that said, unlike Watskco, Rollins actually saw their earnings per share grow year-over-year. In Q2 2025, they brought in 30 cents per share. This quarter it was 32, so it could be worse. Anyway, back over here on Simply Safe with their drop in share price. That's pushed the yield up close to 2%. Once again, this is way higher than the company's 5-year average. And they are also right there at their 52-E low. Also, while we're here, the forward PE ratio of 31.3, which, you know, admittedly is still a bit of a premium is way below the 5-year average of 46.2. Rollins is looking ripe for the picking. But anyway, those are my best and worst performing stocks for the past month. And speaking of Rollins being ripe for the picking, we're going to talk a little bit more about that next where I'm sharing with you all of the stocks I bought this past month. All right, guys. Guys, now getting into all of my buys for the month. And just so you know, this doesn't include any of the purchases from my reinvested dividends. These are just the stocks that I bought for my own contributions. Unsurprisingly, the stock that I contributed the most to was Rollins. I dollar cost average into this one every single week. And throughout July, I picked up 22.7 shares at an average cost of $41 flat, which is great. With that, I also picked up a little bit of Vichy Properties. Nothing too crazy, but I did add 4 1/2 shares throughout the month at an average cost of $25.96. when the share price is that low, I just couldn't resist. And then over in the Roth IRA, I continued my weekly dollar cost averaging into both SCHD and VO. With SHD, I added 11.02 shares at an average cost of 3267. And with VO, I added just over half a share at an average cost of $686.81. Now, in total, looking at all of my contributions throughout the month, for Rollins, I added about $930. That one Vichy purchase was $117. with SHD in VO, I was between 360 and 370 each there. So, totaling up all of these numbers, that's going to bring my total contributions for the month to $1,778. So, overall, guys, it was a slightly higher than usual month of buying for me. I did have some birthday money hit my account not too long ago, so I've been slowly putting that to work, and it probably will continue to do so in August. So, we might see this month be a little bit above average as well, which is totally fine by me. All right, guys. Now, moving on and taking a closer look at my Roth IRA. We are back over here on my dividend portfolio tracking spreadsheet. We can see that right now the Roth is currently valued at $32,995. We're almost at 33K. I did see it get up there at one point, but you know, like I was saying earlier in the video, the past couple trading days, the last couple in the month, we did see a slight pullback. So, that brought us back below 33,000. Still looking really good though. And on the dividend side of things, every single year, this one account is bringing in $760 in dividends. Now, if we compare these numbers to the same time last month, we saw a huge jump in the account value. We added over $1,500 to the Roth IRA just in July. That was pretty sweet. And on the income side of things, we added a smoking $12 to the projected annual income. With that said though, if we combine the value of my main taxable account, which was $111,591, and add that to my $33,000 Roth IRA, that's going to bring my total combined portfolio value to $144,586, which represents a $2,500 increase compared to the start of last month. That's great. Now, looking at the year-to-ate gains so far in the taxable account, we've added $15,659. In the Roth IRA, we've added about $8,900, which means that just here in 2026, which we started out the year at just over $120,000, we have added $24,555 to the portfolio value. Then over on the income side of things, with the taxable brokerage sitting at $3,888 in projected annual income and the Roth IRA at $760, that's going to bring the total projected annual dividend income in my portfolio to $4,648, which represents a $74 increase month overmonth. That's a nice gain. In year-to- date, looking at the breakdown, we started out the year at $4,75 and so far we've added $461 throughout the year. to the taxable accounts projected annual income. We've added $112 to the Roth IRA, which means that so far here in 2026, we have added $573 to the projected annual income. And on the income side of things, my goal by the end of this year is to hit $5,000 in projected income. So, we only have about $350 to go. And with only 5 months left in the year, if we can just continue growing the income at the same rate, you know, around $70 per month, we should be right on the money. And I definitely think we're going to hit it. [music] Now guys, as far as my upcoming plans here in the month of August, I am still laser focused on adding to Rollins. Looking at my full position, I have just under 80 shares at an average cost of $4605, which is a huge improvement from when I started this position. I started buying shares at like $49.5. So, just from dollar cost averaging, as the share price has continued getting lower, we've really been able to bring this average cost down, and I'm so excited to continue doing so. With that said, if we scroll over, this is still such a small position in the portfolio. It's not even 3% of my taxable account, which means it's even less if we consider the combined portfolio, the SHD and V in the Roth IRA. And on the income side of things, it's only 1 and a.5% of the taxable account. So, in both departments, we have plenty of room to continue adding to this position. And still, I think it's only about a third of where I'd like it to be. So, we're going to continue rocking and rolling with this one for a while. But anyway, guys, those are my plans for the portfolio coming up. And if you want to hear about a handful of stocks that I'm most definitely not planning on buying and suggest you do the same, then check out this next video right over here. In this one, you'll learn about three dividend stocks that are showing some pretty big red flags that make me think they could be next to cut their dividends. So, click right over here to learn about those.