Powerplay

Last night I was giving serious thought to my holdings in SHG:Shanta Gold. They climbed well at the start of the gold rally, but have faltered lately as other gold shares continue to rise. I decided that as these do not pay dividends, and as they are a very small company who will need to raise more cash to develop, taking a 20.2% profit would be my best bet. I sold them this morning making a profit of £113.23.

Over the weekend I had already worked out what my new shares would be when I next had some cash. I have been looking at VEC:Vectura which is a pharma company specialising in respiratory conditions. This is a massive market and they appear to be well placed to make lots of profits in the not too distant future.

However, last night I found something else that excited me so much I have changed course. I ended up with £760 in my standard share account, but wanted to add more to my SIPP. As I can't do that until after the settlement date, I added £760 from my bank account, then next week will replace that with the £760 from my share account when I can withdraw it. I purchased 13,471 shares of CWR:Ceres Power Holdings at 5.59p costing £764.98.

Ceres have developed a steel fuel cell. It's basically a plate of steel with holes in it, then they print a layer of ceramic onto it. When heat is applied to one side of the cell, it produces electricity. The plan is that you pack a load of these together and then heat them, say with gas, and it's a very efficient way of producing electricity. A house could produce most of its power and hot water with just 100 fuel cells in a pack. You can just scale up the number of packs to produce more electricity.

They are teamed up with Honda to help fund the research, and British Gas is another of their partners. They can produce a fuel cell every three seconds and then work with their partners to embed them in their products. It's a bit like a micro-chip company supplying tech companies. Ceres have the Intellectual Property rights to the technology too.

They are just in a position to start properly commercialising this technology, so although they have been making a loss for years, that looks set to change. They have no debt, which is also a great benefit. Their interim report is due on Friday, which should make interesting reading.

This does increase my exposure to loss-making penny shares, which I vowed I would cap at 20%, but I want to be a part of this one - it's gripped me like no other share I've seen for a long time.

The movement of money in and out of accounts will confuse the review at the end of the week. Meanwhile it's been a 2nd consecutive bad day today, with more shares down than up as the FTSE 100 slides back well below 6,000. GLEN:Glencore have wiped out all the lovely gains from Monday so are back at £346 loss after coming so close to profit. Deeply upsetting, but not altogether unexpected. The ray of sunshine was TSG:Trans Siberian Gold which climbed another 8.4% and are now up by 123% making £465 profit. Relieved to say that SHG:Shanta Gold didn't move a muscle today, so still happy that I sold them. Let's see if things settle down a bit over the next few days...