Here is a small thread about couple of stocks that I purchased recently:

Why I purchased them?

Why I think it is a good idea?

Why am I sharing the info?

The three stocks that I have picked up recently are:
ITC
ONGC
IOC

Why I purchased them?

To give a brief background, I am in the #MutualFundSahiHai camp. I have a huge chunk of my savings in Mutual Funds. I sold my midcap MF investments recently because I am not confident about them for the next couple of years.

I have been doing significant Mutual Fund based investments for close to a decade and following stock market commentary actively for the past 4-5 years. I thought it is time to start doing direct equity investments.

So, the question was where to keep the money generated by selling midcap MFs?

I think that a long harsh winter is coming for the stock markets and that's why I have the bulk of it in cash. However, some portion of it should go into stocks that I believe are safe havens.

And for those safe havens I looked at companies that are structurally sound for the long term and pay significant dividends.

Why I think it is a good idea?

Dividend based investing doesn't make too much sense considering the tax structure in India but it makes a lot of sense for my goal of safety.

The stocks that I selected are huge mega-cap companies which have been in the business for a really long time. I don't think they will fold in the 5 / 10 / 20 years. I also think that they will continue to pay out significant dividend over the next few years.

How do I define significant dividend?

As long as it beats the post-tax FD return, I would call it significant dividend.

And with that logic I picked ONGC, ITC, IOC.

I think these three, as a basket, would beat FD returns purely from dividend.

Price points are important.

I think this would make sense as long as:
ITC is under 180-200
ONCG under 70-80
IOC under 80-90.

And they have been in this range or below that for most of 2020.

The price appreciation would happen as well over the long term.

Dividend yield is an important reason to make this bet.

Dividend yield adds an extra layer of safety to this bet.

At the end of the day, the goal of a business is to make profits (dividend).

Even if I am wrong, l don't think that I would lose a significant amount of money over the next decade with money in these three stocks. Because if not here, I would have kept it in some form of a debt fund.

To give credit where it is due, they were recommended by couple of friends: @ProfMaterial and @bonsikool. Also @dmuthuk's general advice about dividend based investing and ITC specifically.

Also, a discussion with @poojalapasia and @contliving helped me decide.

Why am I sharing the info?

A lot of people I follow on twitter talk about stocks / investing. I really like what they say and that's the reason why I follow them.

However, they rarely talk about what stocks to buy, what price points to buy them at, and why to buy them.

This always leaves me wanting more and sometimes irritated.

It could be because it is in conflict with their day jobs or there are some legal restrictions on it - to be honest I am not aware.

However, I don't have any such issues and I genuinely believe that such sort of open discussion will help.

And that's why I talked about buying these 3 stocks from a 5 / 10 / 20 years perspective.

I plan to keep buying them over the next couple of years as well.

With that, I would like to end this thread and in the end I will say that the thread is useful for a small set of people.

For a majority, the best idea is to 'Figure out Asset Allocation' and allocate your equity investments to 'Index Funds'.