First retrospective

OK - it's time to review the first 2 months of investing.

Portfolio cost	£25,946.46
Portfolio value (share price)	£25,261.82	(-£602.62)
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£24,496.58	(-£1,449.88)
Dividends	£82.12
Profit from sales	£108.18
Overall profit	-£1,259.59
(Portfolio sale-cost+dividends+profit from sales)

I guess that's not too bad after 2 months. Around £750 of the loss is commission, as it includes the cost of sale. There's still a big loss from the spread where the bid price hasn't caught up to the offer price I paid, the market has been incredibly volatile with the China slow down and uncertainty over interest rates, and Glencore alone is down by £500.

It will be fascinating to compare this summary over the weeks (for me at least!)

Writing this summary did remind me of something. When I got back from Brazil and set up my new spreadsheet, a couple of shares appeared to be over-priced given the profits, growth and current share price. As these were in profit, and my system reckoned they were way, way overpriced, I decided to sell.

Given that my new system has absolutely no track record or evidence to back it up, the sales may be a huge mistake, but they allowed some of the other recent purchases to happen where the companies were straight greens, so I'm comfortable with the decision.

ISG:Interior Services Group. I bought at 168.8p and sold at 235p making £173.60 which was 33% profit. As ISG made a loss last year, I had to make up some figures so my formula would work. Based on their previous year's profits and at 20% growth my system calculated a fair share price of 166p which was just less than I paid for them. Since I sold them the selling price has dropped 19p to 216p, so although I'd love to see them continue to grow, I'm happy with what I got.

REDD:Redde. I bought at 158.51p and sold at 177p making £20.16 which was just 5%. I'm still not convinced I made the right decision. Their graph is evenly upwards, and they have only gone down 2p since I sold. My new system had their fair price at 133p which is what caused the big rush to sell, but there's a lot more than company accounts to drive a share price so I maybe should have ridden it a bit further.

I have a few others in my portfolio targeted for a sale, but I'll keep quiet about those until the deals are done, for fear of jinxing them. I also have a few more star shares I'd like to buy, so more on them when the deals are done. Meanwhile I need some way of validating my new system, so maybe try a few more tweaks to the algorithm to smooth out the extremes, and maybe calculate growth over 3 years instead of 1. Hmmm...