Kilokor

When I was in school in South Africa, my parents, both educators, briefly forayed into the real estate business. I think it was to help a friend get back on his feet. My dad created an interesting logo for the business, based on his background as a geographer.

The logo has a circular core, with radial arms pointing out in different directions. My dad explains that he had based the logo on a map of the Witwatersrand, with Johannesburg at the core, and radial arms reaching out to the neighboring towns of Carltonville and Krugersdorp in the west to Springs and Nigel in the east.

The logo is still being used after all these years. My brother, who lives in the house we grew up in, has sent met this photograph of the logo on a property billboard in the area.

So, what does a real estate logo of yesteryear have to do with dividend growth investing?

Well, recently, I redesigned my Performance page and included a set of radial charts, which are reminiscent of my dad's Kilokor logo. Here's one of them, portraying the current weight distribution of DivGro's holdings.

The holdings are ordered clockwise by purchase date and start with my first buy, CVX, at the 12 o'clock position. I buy stocks for DivGro in chunks of about $2,500 at a time, except for master limited partnerships (MLPs), which I double-up on. Eventually, my goal is to have a weight-balanced portfolio.

From the chart, its clear that GD has performed best of all my holdings and that CHL, ACE, and TGT are the worst performers.

Creating these charts is an interesting process. In Excel, there's no chart type that allows one to create the chart directly. There is a radar chart, though, which can be tricked into creating the radiating wedges. Just repeat each data value several times to "plot" the arc of a wedge.

Since there are 25 holdings in DivGro and 360 degrees in a circle, each wedge spans about 14 degrees. Using a draw resolution of 1 degree, repeat each value 14 times starting at the appropriate column for each wedge. You'll have a spreadsheet of 25x360 values, mostly containing zeros, except for consecutive runs of the same value somewhere in each row. Here's an extract of the first 2 rows of data for the chart above:

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As with many things I've learned about dividend growth investing in the past year, the way to draw these charts is not my own invention, but rather something I learned through a Google search. I love the Internet!