April 2026 Portfolio Update: My Biggest Month Ever (+$73K)

If you have followed my monthly portfolio updates, you know it has been a rough start to the year. December down $13,000. Then $35,000. Then $52,000. Three red months in a row, and I shared every one of them openly because that is what investing actually looks like.

And then April happened. My portfolio jumped from $337,000 on April 1 to $410,000 on May 1. That is a single-month gain of more than $73,000, the biggest swing I have ever had.

The flip month

The thing that made April feel different was not just the absolute number. It was the contrast. After watching my portfolio bleed for three straight months, my biggest single-month loss was around $52,000. April delivered the inverse, plus $73,000.

Honestly, I did not expect April to flip this hard. Looking at the macro backdrop, oil prices climbing, geopolitical tension, the same volatility that punished me in March was still very much there. The market just decided to rally anyway.

The lesson I keep coming back to is the one I shared in my $52K loss post: the people who sat out the last few years waiting for a clean entry missed exactly this kind of month. The biggest gains tend to arrive without warning, and you cannot capture them if you are not already in the market.

The portfolio I rebuilt in April

April was also the month I finished a major restructuring I had been working on. Two big changes.

First, I sold every ETF I held on eToro. eToro is now pure individual stocks, all conviction names I have studied and want to hold long term. The full reasoning for that move is in my "sold ETFs, bought 10 stocks" post, but the short version is that mixing index funds with stock picks made the portfolio harder to follow for anyone copying me, and diluted the thesis.

Second, I moved most of my crypto from a hardware wallet to Coinbase. More on that later in the post.

Broker by broker

I currently use four main brokers, each with a specific role. The setup is deliberate, not just an accumulation of accounts. Snowball Analytics now syncs all four automatically through its AutoSync feature, which finally killed the manual update spreadsheet I used to keep.

Why eToro was the standout

eToro had its best month since I started the account in October 2024. Up 22.8% in April, year-to-date up 13.7%, beating both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 over the last 12 months. The portfolio is now at over $127,000, with realised plus unrealised gains north of $27,000 since inception.

I currently have 13 copiers and, touch wood, all of them are in the green. If you want to mirror what I hold, you can copy me on the platform. The trades I place go straight into your account proportionally, no commissions on either side.

Why I moved most of my crypto to Coinbase

This was the change I had been putting off for a while. For years I kept the bulk of my Bitcoin on a hardware wallet, which is the textbook answer for self-custody. Not your keys, not your crypto.

The problem was operational. I split my time between the UAE and Europe, and right now I am writing this from an Airbnb in Barcelona. Where do I keep the hardware wallet? Where do I keep the seed phrase, in another country, with me, in the apartment? Every travel decision turned into a low-grade anxiety loop.

So I moved the majority of my Bitcoin to Coinbase. Stock-listed in the US, regulated, and accessible from anywhere I happen to be. I still keep some on Nexo earning daily interest, and I plan to spread further across exchanges over time so I am not single-platform dependent. It is a personal trade-off, not a recommendation. For most people, a hardware wallet is still the right answer.

High-yield euros: Go & Grow and Monefit

The boring part of my portfolio that quietly does its job every day. I keep my emergency fund split across two euro platforms, both paying daily interest, both with same-day liquidity up to a limit.

Both pay interest every single day, both let you pull up to €1,000 instantly, and both compound automatically. Go & Grow has been earning me over €800 in cumulative interest across the time I have used it. Monefit was a more recent addition but is now my higher-yield slot at 7.5%.

My target is to get the combined position across both platforms up to €50,000. That is the size where the daily compounding becomes meaningful as a real second income stream rather than a rounding error. Neither platform is a bank, neither carries deposit insurance, so both involve platform risk in exchange for the higher rate. That is the trade-off.

Final thoughts on April

April was a reminder that the market does not care about my predictions, my timing, or my conviction. It does what it does. The job is to stay invested, keep dollar-cost averaging into companies and structures I believe in, and accept that the path will be lumpy.

Three red months in a row felt awful. April flipped almost all of those losses back to green plus a record gain on top. If I had stepped out of the market in February when things looked grim, I would have missed it entirely. That is the single biggest lesson I keep relearning year after year.

Next month I will be back with another update. If you want to follow the portfolio in real time between updates, you can subscribe to the live tracker, or check the rest of the blog for deeper dives into the individual positions.

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