20 ‘Every Day Stocks’ I’d Struggle To Live Without

This type of article is one I’ve encouraged many beginning investors to write, but I recently noticed I’ve never published a version of myself: go through a typical day/month/year and write down every listed company you come across. Better yet, estimate about how much of your budget you spend on that company, in order to better weight these stocks you do business with in proportion to how much you contribute to their revenues. Probably the most public article I’ve written on this topic of “every day stocks” was in early 2018, when I outlined 10 stocks to buy a 10-year-old to encourage interest in finance and investing shortly after a student learns to add and multiply. That 10-year-old I wrote about is now about to turn 17, so an article like this needs to be an even concrete outline of how he should look out for the companies he encounters in his day-to-day life and better understand how they make money, and how competition can kill them.

For this article, I am going to casually walk through a typical day in my life as an American white-collar married father of three living in Switzerland, who personally tries to avoid doing business with big listed companies when possible, but can’t avoid them entirely. In this way, I will be noting listed companies whose revenues I can hardly avoid contributing to regularly, and how difficult it might be to steer my spending away from them. To keep things easy, I also only note down names I can see, not any “behind the scenes” companies which I know are just as important, but not as visible. As a consumer, you should be able to write a similar “day in the life” article about your own spending habits, and use it to build a similar “counter-consumption” portfolio at the end, where the stocks are weighted by how much of your budget you spend with each company. To keep this article brief, I may skip some names, and will round my estimated spending to very rough numbers, but it should be a good enough framework to start.

#1: My Bank

If I start counting my day at midnight, while I’m still asleep, I should start by counting which companies make money from me while I’m sleeping, and the most obvious is the bank providing the mortgage for us to have our house. Our mortgage is with UBS Group AG (UBS), which offered us the lowest rate of the three banks we got offers from, and the main thing keeping us from switching is that we haven’t yet found another mortgage offer with a lower-enough rate to make the switch worthwhile. We currently spend around $75/day on mortgage interest, making this a fairly large expense, and likely a large weight in the “counter-consumption” portfolio.

#2-3: Insurance

Still sleeping, one thing that helps me sleep well is that we are well insured. Here’s where my budget starts excluding listed companies, whether I like it or not: Swiss residents are required to buy health insurance, but all of the competing health insurers are organized as non-profit foundations, so the roughly $35/day we spend on health insurance won’t be allocated to any public stock. The same goes for insurance on our house, which is provided by a state government agency. Of the insurance I can attribute to a public company, I estimate we spend maybe around $5/day each to subsidiaries of Legal & General Group Plc (OTCPK:LGGNY) and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.B).

#4: Apple

I wake up to the vibration of my Apple Watch, according to the time set by my iPhone, both products made by Apple Inc. (AAPL). This $3.35T company is one that would be much harder for me to switch away from than my bank or my insurer, simply because I find the ecosystem of all the Apple devices in our household (one iMac, two MacBooks, three iPads, four iPhones, two Apple watches, and one Apple TV) to be so much better than the alternatives. I tried switching away from Apple to Android twice, and hated almost every day of my Android experience, to the point that I celebrated getting back on iPhone and don’t see a case for switching anytime soon. Despite the amazing value of Apple products and irreplaceable roles in our household, I believe our contribution to AAPL revenues may seem low by comparison, given that we’ve bought many of these devices second hand, and tend to use them for many years before replacing them. Back of envelope, I’d estimate our household averages maybe $25/day on Apple products and services.

#5-6: Gym Clothes

Next I get dressed to go to the gym, for which about half of my wardrobe comes from Under Armour, Inc. (UA) and the other half from adidas AG (OTCQX:ADDYY). My wife and kids have other items from other brands, but here I’ll just put down $1/day for each of these two.

#7-9: Hygiene

I get home from the gym and drop my clothes from the laundry, where we usually wash it with OMO detergent, one of the brands owned by Unilever PLC (UL). For body soap, I prefer a rose soap I get from our local Turkish shop, where the packaging is in Turkish, and so I was surprised to look at the fine print and see even that soap was made in Turkey by a subsidiary of the Colgate-Palmolive Company (CL). While CL is also well-known for its toothpaste, I started brushing my teeth with a toothpaste brand owned by GSK spin-off Haleon plc (HLN). As rough numbers, I’ll also assume I spend about $1/day each with UL, CL, and HLN.

#10: Kitchen Appliances

Before leaving, I try and have a good breakfast, which in our kitchen is usually prepared on an induction range made by Swedish company AB Electrolux (OTCPK:ELUXY), which came with our house and will probably last another decade or two, but I’ll allocate another $1/day to it. Most of our other appliances are made by the German private company Miele, and we also have two ovens made by the Swiss small-cap company V-Zug, whose stock unfortunately has no US ticker.

#11: Transportation

I’m fortunate to live in a place with an excellent rail network, so we don’t need a car, but that does come at the cost of about $17/day for a pass that gives our family unlimited public transportation across the country. The Swiss Federal Railway is a state-owned enterprise, but a good chunk of the rail infrastructure is built and maintained by the local company Stadler Rail AG (OTCPK:SRAIF). While I’m not sure how accurate this is, I’ll assume Stadler gets a little less than a quarter of what we spend on our rail pass, or about $4/day.

#12: Microsoft

On my way to work, and at work, we use software made by the Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), namely Office apps like Outlook, Excel and Word, and so does my wife at her company. I could be completely off, but I’ll estimate that’s about $2/day from our household for the two of us to use Microsoft products at work.

#13-15: My Professional Counterparties

Professionally, I am a wealth manager, and a good share of my business’ trade execution and custody is done with two platforms: Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (IBKR) and the Charles Schwab Corporation (SCHW). These trades also need to go through one of many exchanges, for which just one example of an exchange I deal with almost daily since moving to Europe is the London Stock Exchange Group plc (OTCPK:LNSTY). While I don’t think it would be fair to try and estimate my company’s business volume through these platforms, I’ll roughly estimate my personal share (that is, how much these three companies get just executing my family’s personal trades and providing custody services) might roughly average about $3, $2, and $1 per day for these three respectively.

#16: Google

While I do use Bing on some Microsoft Windows devices, the main app I use for search, including on my Apple Safari browsers, is Google, owned by Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL). This also includes YouTube, which I still find to be one of the most useful sources for searching for and distributing videos on the widest range of topics. I really have no idea how to even guesstimate how much money Google makes off me, so I’ll assume about $2/day for our family, even though the money comes out of the advertiser’s budget (it’s the time and attention that comes out of our budget, but that’s another currency).

#17-18: Travel Planning

One thing I love doing, and looking forward to, is traveling, so on my typical day’s ride home from work, I’m quite likely to take at least one quick search on Expedia (EXPE) to get a live update on airfares for where we might go next. If I do fly, most likely I’ll be flying out of my nearest local airport, which happens to be the listed company Flughafen Zürich AG (OTCPK:FLGZY). As a family, we spend quite a bit on travel each year, though most of it is outside Expedia and the airport, but I’ll allocate $5/day to each of these for now.

#19: Food

Although I’ve tried my best to eat food from smaller local producers rather than listed companies, as a resident of a landlocked country, there is one category of food it is harder to get here any other way, and that’s seafood. As a placeholder here, I’ll note Norwegian Salmon company Mowi ASA (OTCPK:MHGVY). We don’t eat fish that often, so I’ll put $1/day down for this.

#20: Taxes

One big expense I’ve left to the end of the day is one that goes not to a stock, but to the government that retains the right to tax me as long as I’m a US citizen. While I also pay Swiss taxes, the US has the first right to tax money I make in the US, and then I need to claim credit for that on my Swiss return. My US taxes partly go to pay interest on the debt held in a 100% treasury ETF like the iShares U.S. Treasury Bond ETF (GOVT), so I’ll put that down as my 20th “stock” for this article. I don’t feel like looking up the actual amount of US tax I pay per day, but to round out my daily total of budget expenses I was able to account for to a round $200/day, let’s say I spend $58/day on US taxes.

Conclusion

Looking simply at the list of stocks I noticed over the course of this typical day, it wouldn’t be the worst list of stocks to start to build a portfolio from, given that all of these are easy-to-understand businesses with a stable source of revenue from consumers like me. It is notable that this list contains no REITs, no utilities, no energy companies, no health care (because my health insurer is not listed, and I didn’t get sick today), and also leaves out many other good businesses where I don’t spend money with public companies. When we look at the weighting, we can’t help but think this is an extremely lopsided portfolio, primarily made up of one bank stock, followed by US treasuries, followed by AAPL. If I were to continue trying to turn this into a real investible portfolio, I might try and even out the weights a little bit more, and take a closer look at how sustainable the profits are for each of these companies. After all, one of the goals of a “counter-consumption” portfolio is to have it pay you dividends that more or less match your daily expenses so that you can live on those dividends with the expectation that price increases will be matched by dividend increases.

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I should finish off by saying that one inspiration for this article was the idea that the Magnificent 7 are as big as they are because of how big a role they have come to play in our daily lives. Even though I live outside the US, I still found myself spending more money on each of at least three of the Magnificent 7 companies than I do on most Swiss companies, which probably justifies at least some exposure, even if not market cap weights. Hopefully, this idea of consumption weighting at least inspires a different way of thinking about it, even though most of us won’t go that extreme.

Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. exchange. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks.