I hope your April was good. For me, it wasn’t such a great month. I spent a good part of April sick with a horrible nagging cough and felt very fatigued, so almost nothing got done last month. Prodded by my wife, I finally saw a doctor and took a 7 day regimen of antibiotics. The cough receded, and I finally felt my energy returning. Spring continued here in the Pacific Northwest, with over two weeks straight of cloudy, partly cloudy, and sunny days. But being sick, I did little to take advantage of the good weather. <sigh> April was a wild ride for the stock market, with the month ending 1000 points lower than it began. That doesn’t bode well for May, but we’ll see.

ARR $26.40
AWP $44.80
CIK $22.50
CLM $65.16
DHY $27.13
EDF $18.00
EHI $28.00
EXG $32.85
NCV $23.80
PFN $32.31
ZTR $15.00
TOTAL $335.95

* Includes Return of Capital

Interestingly, April’s $335.95 total was very close to March’s projected $335.05 monthly income.

EXG shareholders were thrilled in April, as EXG raised its dividend from $0.0553/share to $0.0657/share. An 18.8% increase! Yay! However, I needed cash this month again so I sold off another 100 shares of EXG at $7.827/share, so that dividend increase won’t do me much good. At least the dividend increase will somewhat mitigate the hit to dividend income resulting from this month’s EXG sell-off. Continuing my little penny stock experiment, I bought 18,225 shares of VDRM at $0.01/share. We’ll see how long it will be until I sell at a nice profit (35% or better is my target).

Overall, April was an okay month, with the EXG dividend raise being an unexpected pleasant surprise.