Week 42 Review

Not a bad week. Most things just ticked along and some juicy dividends arrived. Biggest loser was one of my best shares HGM:Highland Gold. These dropped by 14% as the price of gold slipped, but they partly made up for it by delivering a £50 dividend today.

The only other double-digit mover was share of the week TRX:Tissue Regenix which climbed 12% just after I topped up my SIPP holding. That's taken the SIPP holding into profit and my main portfolio holding to £123 profit, and I'm hoping that's just the start!

Not quite double-digit, but a mention has to go to GVC:GVC Holdings which climbed another 9% and is now making £955 profit, and I've already taken another £236 profit when I sold 25% of my shares.

Another happy sight is JLP:Jubilee Platinum seeming to be settling in a 3.4p zone lifting my combined holding into profit. If it can stabilise there, any future good news should see the profits increase healthily.

Here's the main portfolio performance

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£36,979.15		+£0
Portfolio value (share price)	£34,762.02	(-5.5%)	+£370.09
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£33,566.09	(-9.2%)	+£300.04
Potential profits	£1,465.40		+£278.52
Dividends	£486.82		+£0
Profit from sales	£3,381.80		+£0
Average monthly cash profit	£394.08		-£9.61
(Sold stocks profit + Dividends - Fees / Months)
Avg annual % of current portfolio cost	12.8%

No sales, dividends or injections this week so it's a simple case of the sell price going up around £300, most of which was from the stocks already in profit. Monthly performance dipped as a result but is still very healthy.

The SIPP looks like this after the first 6 months

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£11,880.42		+£400.27
Portfolio value (share price)	£13,371.94	(+13%)	+£43.77
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£13,019.51	(+9.6%)	-£42.61
Potential profits	£1,582.58		-£183.57
Dividends	£101.31		+£52.49
Profit from sales	£706.12		+£0
Average monthly cash profit	£131.96		+£3.82
(Sold stocks profit + Dividends - Fees / Months)
Avg annual % of current portfolio cost	13.3%

The extra £400 came from the tax man, leftover dividends and a little injection from my current account. I used it to buy one of my 4 world domination game-changer shares TRX:Tissue Regenix. Their share price has been struggling lately, and out of my big four I hold significantly less in this one. I bought 2,174 shares for 18p costing £400.27. Happy to say these have zoomed up since, so I'm happily in profit.

Mixed week for the portfolio, with the share price going up by the same amount as the sell price went down, as the spreads widen. Potential profits crashed by £183, most of which was down to HGM:Highland Gold, so it's a good job the losses narrowed. £50 dividend came from HGM:Highland Gold and £2.49 from AA:Alcoa, doubling my dividends for the second week in a row - and not long before the CAML:Central Asia Metals dividend doubles it again. The dividend was enough to squeeze up the monthly performance by £3.82 a month and raise the projected return to 13.3%.

Bank holiday weekend this weekend, so a shorter week next week. No prospect of any new cash so I think the only movements next week will be the possibility of me selling something to get my £600 holiday money back and safely in my holiday fund account - but it's so tempting to make it work for another few months. Big problem is my intention was to sell the AVM:Avocet Mining shares for a great big profit and use that to pay for my holiday. The fact these are making £400 loss means I'm stuck with them and I'll have to sell something else instead. I don't want to be pressured into selling one of my best shares just to get the cash, so I think it's better to liberate asap and put a big fence around it.

Week 41 Review

This week started really badly, and several shares went ex-dividend causing short term dips. Worst performer was AFPO:African Potash which dropped 11% after a brief revival last week. If they don't earn some revenue soon it's all going to pot rather than potash. The other poor performer was RCI:Rapidcloud which inexplicably dropped 10% reducing my profit to just £149.

The pointless panic over Brexit has subsided, so the house builders are finally starting to climb and my losses are narrowing. Best performer was TW.:Taylor Wimpey, climbing 11% and now only £2.55 down, although with the £7.08 dividend that arrived today you could say they were in profit.

Share of the Week is AMYT:Amryt Pharma, which after giving me a right scare has justified my confidence and leaped 14% this week. That's made up half the losses, so I'm still down £285, but every penny this goes up is worth £150 so I'm hoping it will get to break even soon.

Here's the story for the main portfolio

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£36,979.15		+£178.33
Portfolio value (share price)	£34,391.93	(-6.5%)	+£137.51
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£33,266.05	(-10%)	+£92.57
Potential profits	£1,186.88		-£263.88
Dividends	£486.82		+£13.08
Profit from sales	£3,381.80		+£196.34
Average monthly cash profit	£403.69		+£12.59
(Sold stocks profit + Dividends - Fees / Months)
Avg annual % of current portfolio cost	13.1%

The profit from sales increased by £196 thanks to selling a quarter of my GVC:GVC Holdings shares. The profit from this was higher, but the £40 loss I took disposing of MMX:Minds & Machines zapped a bit of it. Most of this was re-invested so the total cost of the portfolio went up by £178 as I topped up my holdings in AMYT:Amryt Pharma just in time, and CWR:Ceres Power.

The sales caused my potential profit to drop and I lost another £70 on top of that, mainly thanks to the drop in RCI:Rapidcloud.

Good news for dividends, with £7.08 from TW.:Taylor Wimpey and £6.00 from BDEV:Barratt Developments resulting in a £13.08 increase. Add that to the sales, and average monthly income tops £400 - yippee! With the sales projected to make a 13.1% return and the portfolio down by 10% I guess that means I'll be just about up overall if I keep the performance going for another 3 months.

The SIPP looks like this

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£11,480.15		+£3.02
Portfolio value (share price)	£12,927.90	(+12.7%)	+£39.31
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£12,661.85	(+10.3%)	+£6.53
Potential profits	£1,766.15		+£31.18
Dividends	£48.82		+£27.68
Profit from sales	£706.12		+£6.23
Average monthly cash profit	£128.14		+£0.78
(Sold stocks profit + Dividends - Fees / Months)
Avg annual % of current portfolio cost	13.4%

Fairly flat week, but nice to double my dividend income with £24.08 from LLOY:Lloyds and £3.60 from JLG:John Laing Group.

I sold my holding in SLI:Standard Life Property Investment this morning for a gigantic £6.23 (0.3%) profit. I'd bought it as a solid dividend yield of 5.6%, but I feel there's a risk property prices will start to drop soon, and I had a contrarian plan I was keen to execute so needed the capital.

I'd been thinking about those who short stock. Personally I think it's despicable and shouldn't be allowed, as it's basically gambling but the impact can be severe on real people, jobs and other shareholders. I had witnessed the effect of multiple shorts being stopped when GLEN:Glencore went ballistic just before I sold out. As stop loss after stop loss triggered, the price absolutely soared.

I then considered the mentality of shorters, and there does appear to be a herding instinct, with some shares targeted and relentless campaigns waged to keep shorting so much that the shorts themselves force down the price. However, if this is done to a sound company, at some point there will be a trigger that breaks the cycle and stop-losses fly into action.

I decided to look at the most shorted stocks, which are disclosed and available on the web, and see if there was one that had strong fundamentals. It had to be a stock I would buy anyway, so avoiding any that were clearly being shorted because they are duff or high risk. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the fundamentals of the most shorted stock and found them to be pretty sound. CLLN:Carillion has an amazing 19.71% of its stock out on loan as shorts. That's 84.8 million shares. Imagine if enough stop losses trigger to even close half of those - an instant need to buy 40 million shares. That could be carnage for those trying to close their positions as the price rockets.

On my analysis spreadsheet they fall down on a slightly low ROCE of 7% when I prefer 10%, and there's a big concern over debt, with £2.39 billion 15 times their profits when I normally aim for 3. However, I'm so fascinated with the potential for something interesting to happen that I'll overlook that.

Those are the negatives - but the positives are pretty impressive. 6.7% dividend yield and a P/E ratio of just 8.81 gives loads of room for share price growth, and with £41bn worth of potential pipeline orders, there's not much danger of a drastic drop in profits. Even if the shares drop a bit, I don't mind for my SIPP if I'm getting 6.7%. It's better than the 5.6% I would have got keeping SLI:Standard Life. The enterprise value alone is worth 421p a share and a P/E of 15 plus growth would get it up to 596p, over twice the current price.

So with that in mind I bought 371 shares at 273.54p and £5.07 stamp duty costing £1,028.85. Needless to say they dropped a few pence today so I'm losing £39, but I'm excited to see if this one becomes a roller coaster - and it will be one in the eye for the shorters if things go bonkers.

Further consolidation

Over the weekend I resolved to increase my holdings in two of my favourite potential growth companies.

First I sold my shares in MMX:Minds & Machines which have been very disappointing, particularly following their recent report of a loss. I did lose £40.40 which is 3.9% but I wanted to liberate the £1,081 to spend on something with a bit more promise.

I used this to increase my holding in AMYT:Amryt Pharma. The shares have dropped relentlessly since the reverse takeover, from 24p to 17.5p losing me lots of money. I still believe with the strength of the directors and a product ready for market, this is insanely cheap. I bought another 5,826 shares at 17.01p costing £999.95, taking my total holding to 16,432 shares at an average of around 20p. The price fell a bit further today, so my total loss stands at £614. One of my worst performing shares, but I still believe it will become one of my best.

My next consolidation was in CWR:Ceres Power Holdings. I already have 24,927 in my SIPP costing £1,398. These are doing remarkably well, up 62% from when I bought them at 5.52p and making £882 profit. The new batch cost 9.29p each and I bought 11,549 costing £1,081.85. I want more of these after reading the details of the new Honda hydrogen powered car, which I'm pretty sure is powered by a Ceres power pack.

I paid for these with £1,000 loaded into my ISA from my current account. I can't afford £1,000 so I reluctantly sold 189 of my GVC:GVC Holdings shares from my share account for a £236 profit (27.5%). That still leaves me with 560 shares, and sod's law dictates that the price went up by 6.5p after I sold them, which would have been worth about £100, rather than Ceres which stayed still. I think GVC will continue to rise, but long term Ceres will rise quicker and more spectacularly, so it was nice to take some of the profits from the GVC success so far. As soon as these clear, I'll transfer the cash back to my current account.

On one hand the taking of profits has made the monthly cash profit absolutely fantastic, taking it to £413 a month which is a 13.4% return. On the downside, the falls in prices plus the removal of profit has hammered the paper performance, with the main portfolio down by £4,200 which is 11.4%. It does mean my gains are bigger than my losses, but I desperately need to turnaround some of my big losses, with four shares alone contributing to £2,487 of the loss.

My new consolidation strategy will continue, as some of my laclustre shares get into profit I will sell them and increase my holdings in CWR:Ceres Power Holdings, AMYT:Amryt Pharma, OPTI:Optibiotix and TRX:Tissue Regenix. These are all sound companies with products that are just ready for commercialisation and which could have gigantic worldwide markets. I may of course be wrong, but they all seem to be on sound financial footing, so I believe they have a strong future.

Week 40 Review

Not a great week for the portfolio, with a few sales and purchases failing to make much of an impact  but removing a big chunk of profits and severely damaging the paper performance. The one important milestone was earning another "Woohoo!" as the portfolio cost ticked past £48,000, albeit not for long as I need to extract my holiday money back to my current account before September.

Biggest loser this week was possibly the biggest catastrophe since I started out, given that buying it in the first place was a moment of utter madness. AVM:Avocet Mining dropped another 12% and is 34% down in 2 weeks, losing £367 that should be in my holiday fund! There's still a few months for the gold price to stay high and this to recover. However, news appeared today that they are consolidating the shares, so my 9,902 shares will become 990 at 68p (ish), assuming no change in sp until the consolidation date in June. This has been done so they can raise more capital from a share issue, thus diluting and no doubt reducing my chances of getting back into profit.

TON:Titon Holdings gave a rather downbeat trading statement this week that Q1 profits were slightly down on the same time last year - still healthy profits though. The share price was hammered by 12% which means my profit is more than halved to £142. Quite glad I sold half of them a few weeks ago!

The other double-digit loser this week was ALM:Allied Minds which dropped by 11% and is now 19% down on when I bought it. So much for Neil Woodford being an investment genius -  my SIPP may have a few things to say about that, as it's losing £346 on these.

For every down there's an up, and the first good news story this week is CRL:Creightons which has been losing loads due to the massive spread ever since I bought them. Today they climbed 13% and into profit - albeit just £1.62p.

After the dramatic plunge last week leading me to expect bankruptcy, this week AFPO:African Potash announced that the licence for their potash mine has been renewed - huzzah! Unfortunately they don't have any money to get it producing, but the shares did go up by 13% and are now only down by 67% and losing £497.

Share of the week award this week goes to one of my old favourites JLP:Jubilee Platinum. Every time it looks like things might be about to turn around, something bites us on the bum and they drop again. This time it appears chromium production is going to be much higher than expected, and the platinum content of the resulting tailings is very high, so they may sell the tailings to another platinum company while waiting to build our own processing plant. This would be great news, as at least we would be benefiting from the high platinum price, rather than just being a chrome producer. The market liked the news, sending the shares up 14%. It's not quite enough for my three holdings to get into profit, but another similar increase of about 20% will get me up to about £560 profit. If they ever get to 10p a share, I'll be £4,500 in profit. This isn't unrealistic if they get production going at their other site and a long awaited mining licence turns up at their third site.

Here's the portfolio performance this week

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£36,800.82		+£448.56
Portfolio value (share price)	£34,076.09	(-6.9%)	-£1,055.22
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£32,995.15	(-10.3%)	-£964.38
Potential profits	£1,450.76		-£806.44
Dividends	£473.34		+£0
Profit from sales	£3,185.46		+£400.23
Average monthly cash profit	£391.10		+£34.03
(Sold stocks profit + Dividends - Fees / Months)
Avg annual % of current portfolio cost	12.8%

So I got £400 profit from selling CMCL:Caledonia Mining, EMH:European Metals and FXI:Fusionex in order to buy OPTI:Optibiotix which has promptly dropped in value and is losing £148. That was a well-timed purchase!

The portfolio cost has gone up by £448 as there were some dividends lying around in my ISA that I added to the capital when buying Optibiotix.

The potential profits have dropped by over £800, so there's £400 loss on top of the shares I sold. Much of this was due to the drop in TON:Titon Holdings but I also had shares like SPD:Sports Direct slip back into loss this week.

Add to that the losses on shares that were already on a loss, and the total dismal picture this week is a drop in portfolio value of £964. On the flip side, the cash profits went up by £34 a month to keep me well above the 10% target with only 12 weeks to the end of my first year investing. Can I keep it in double figures for the annual snapshot?

The SIPP looks like this

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£11,477.13		+£158.85
Portfolio value (share price)	£12,885.57	(+12.3%)	+£17.25
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£12,652.30	(+10.2%)	+£21.14
Potential profits	£1,734.97		+£111.47
Dividends	£21.14		+£0
Profit from sales	£699.89		+£0
Average monthly cash profit	£127.36		-£6.45
(Sold stocks profit + Dividends - Fees / Months)
Avg annual % of current portfolio cost	13.3%

Much healthier than the other place. My monthly regular purchase of JLG:John Laing Group went through and added another 73 shares, bringing my total to 141 at an average price of 221.5p. These are down by 3% but only making £25 loss due to the tiny £3 commission. I'm finding I don't mind at all if the price drops, as it means I get more for my money. It's a nice way to buy shares - I'm seriously thinking about switching all my pension contributions to this method, as my final salary scheme is about to close down at work. It really depends on what they plan to do with employer contribution in the new scheme.

Potential profits are up thanks to JLP:Jubilee Platinum going from loss to £51 profit and CWR:Ceres Power Holdings climbing even further and now standing at £882 profit (67%). This mitigated the drop of AA:Alcoa back down to loss, and the continuing demise of ALM:Allied Minds, my only serious pension fund under-performer. Those losses mean it's a pretty much break-even week, with just a £21 rise in sell value.

Next week we will see if JLP:Jubilee Platinum continues to rise, if AVM:Avocet Mining continues to fall, if CAML:Central Asia Metals rallies leading up to ex-dividend day on Thursday, and if OPTI:Optibiotix reward my £4,000 investment with at least the 4p rise I need to get into profit. After that each penny rise earns me £47 - yippee!

Some consolidation

I decided to consolidate some of my shares last night, so set about taking profits in my ISA and increasing my holding in OPTI:Optibiotix, which I am convinced is going to do something spectacular in the near future.

I reluctantly said goodbye to CMCL:Caledonia Mining, as these have been great shares. They made £168.40 profit which is 16% and liberated £1,184.

I also sold my Lithium mine EMH:European Metals. This may have much further to go, but it's a high risk micro cap miner, so I'm happy to take £168.24 profit, which is 28.1%, liberating £744.

My final sale was FXI:Fusionex which had a great spurt yesterday and although I think has a lot of long term potential, there's a risk of another dip on the trading update later this week. Having said that, there's just as big a risk of an even bigger rise. Nevertheless, I took a relatively small £63.60 profit which is 5.8% and liberated £1,083.

This meant I could do some serious consolidation in OPTI:Optibiotix, buying 3,390 shares at 90p costing a total of £3,059.95. That takes my total holding to 4,740 shares at a weighted average of 86.49684p costing £4,117.85 and makes them my biggest single holding. They are currently making a profit of £41.40, and disappointingly made no movement today - in fact the price was completely flat all day.

Meanwhile, CWR:Ceres Power Holdings climbed 5.6%, which was great for my SIPP but made me wonder if I'd invested in the wrong potential global game-changer!

Never mind - I'll get some more Ceres shares next time I consolidate...

Week 39 Review

A fairly poor week with some big drops in value. Biggest loser this week was KIBO:Kibo Mining, dropping by 31% which was all of last week's gains wiped out. Not far behind was my genius new purchase AVM:Avocet Mining, dropping 21% after my panic buy on Monday which I'm now regretting rather intensly. RCI:Rapidcloud dropped by 14% but is still showing a healthy profit, AA:Alcoa dropped 11% losing most of the recent gains and HGM:Highland Gold also dropped 11% which I'm hoping is a blip caused by profit taking.

Happy to say it wasn't all doom and gloom. MMX:Minds + Machines recovered from the recent collapse and gained 11%, and share of the week is one of my favourites CWR:Ceres Power Holdings, which climbed 19%.

Here's the effect on the main portfolio

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£36,352.26		-£19.89
Portfolio value (share price)	£34,682.75	(-4%)	-£402.14
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£33,510.97	(-7.8%)	-£500.34
Potential profits	£2,257.20		-£164.02
Dividends	£473.34		+£36.57
Profit from sales	£2,785.23		-£24.28
Average monthly cash profit	£357.07		-£8.00
(Sold stocks profit + Dividends - Fees / Months)
Avg annual % of current portfolio cost	11.8%

Portfolio cost went down due to the loss I took on BYG:Big Yellow Group in order to pursue my foolhardy purchase of AVM:Avocet Mining meaning there was less to re-invest. What an idiot!

Overall sale value dropped by £500, almost half of which is the loss on AVM:Avocet Mining - did I mention I was annoyed about that?

Dividends went up by £36.57 thanks to SGRO:Segro but profit from sales is down £24.28 from the BYG:Big Yellow Group sale at a loss.

If is wasn't for that, my monthly profit may have remained about unchanged, but it almost cancels out my dividend and so the monthly profit dropped by £8 and the percentage return is starting to sneak down towards 10%, which I'm keen to stay above.

The SIPP looks like this

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£11,318.28		+£0
Portfolio value (share price)	£12,709.47	(+12.3%)	-£385.92
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£12,472.31	(+11.2%)	-£335.41
Potential profits	£1,623.50		-£133.24
Dividends	£21.14		+£0
Profit from sales	£699.89		+£0
Average monthly cash profit	£133.81		-£6.08
(Sold stocks profit + Dividends - Fees / Months)
Avg annual % of current portfolio cost	14.2%

No activity this week, just a rubbish performance as 3% was wiped off the profits. I guess there will be a few weeks like this, but I really hope we don't get a trend.

Next week sees my monthly DD go into the SIPP, so a few more JLG:John Laing Group shares will be added to my portfolio. These are down 7% from when I bought the first lot, so the good news is I get more for my money this month!

My big hope for next week is AVM:Avocet Mining doesn't turn out to be a horrible mistake and starts to climb back towards breaking even, although if it doesn't, at least I'll have learned a valuable lesson - albeit the hard way.

Gold Mine Misery

I spent much of the weekend searching for another gold mine to invest in. Gold is still going bonkers, but many of the shares had risen so much I was dubious about the chances of fantastic growth. What I needed was a mine that has missed the last surge.

Amazingly I found it - AVM:Avocet Mining had risen from 2p to 4p in the February gold rush, but given they used to trade at 250p this seemed like a meagre increase.

A first quarter update had signaled an increase in production, so with gold prices even higher this seemed like the perfect time to pounce. The share price had gone up by 29% on Friday, but I was ready to leap into action as the market opened on Tuesday morning after the bank holiday.

I had to sell first. My BYG:Big Yellow Group shares had been dragging themselves like a snail back towards profitability, but I decided to take a £25 loss in order to leap upon the bonanza about to hit Avocet

In the time it took me to sell those shares, the asking price had risen from 6.5p to 10.25p - Aaaarghh!!

What to do? Last time this happened I baled out and turned away, only to see TLY:Totally climb by a further 40% and then about 100% over the following week. Well this time I wasn't going to be scared off, and bought 9,902 shares at 10.25p with £5.07 stamp duty costing £1,028.98.

Well that was a mistake - they stayed high all morning and it looked like I might sneak into profit on the day, but by the end they had dropped and I was down by £100. Today they dropped another 10% and I'm down by £194. Bugger!

I'm hoping the drops were caused by people taking short term profits. I know I have when penny shares have gone up by 100%. With the gold price as it is, these do appear to have potential to get up to 20p.

I'm a little annoyed with myself though - I'm trying to reduce my exposure to high risk shares, but what do I do - sell a good, solid dividend-paying share to buy a loss-making speculative purchase in the hope of rapid gain. Exactly the behaviour I'm trying to avoid.

Not only that - but what happened to buy low and sell high? What was I thinking, buying at about 40% above the price I was aiming for? The experience with TLY:Totally has screwed me up in many ways!

To compound my misery over this purchase, the rest of the portfolio lost £300 today and is down £400 at the halfway point of the week. The leap in KIBO:Kibo Mining early in the week was erased today. FXI:Fusionex has slumped to a loss, as has SPD:Sports Direct. RCI:Rapidcoud has lost half it's profit value and my big hope AMYT:Amryt Pharma just keeps dropping and is now down by £310.

One tiny ray of sunshine to cling onto is the rise of CWR:Ceres Power Holdings by 13% today, lifting the profit to a wonderful £770 and saving the SIPP falling into the red for the week, at least for now...