The Big £50K

It may only be for a limited period, but a huge milestone was reached this morning when my total amount invested passed £50,000 earning a gigantic Woohoo!

I say it's for a limited period as I had "borrowed" £1,000 from my current account just after payday to take advantage of the Brexit volatility. However, if I was going to do that I would have bought something like LLOY:Lloyds Bank on Friday. Unfortunately I found two shares over the weekend that were so exciting I got distracted and bought for the long term in my ISA instead.

This does leave me with a slight dilemma - that I need to extract that £1,000 back into my current account by about 6th August when it will run out. I also need to extract my holiday money at some point before September, so there's no way the portfolio cost will remain above £50K unless something amazing happens.

In the meantime, the first share that caught my eye during weekend research was IKA:Ilika. This is a company that has patented a new type of lithium battery. It's far smaller than a standard lithium battery, and much more resilient, coping with -20 to 100 degrees C. They have been working with ARM:ARM Holdings who have a certain pedigree, and have recently launched their first battery.

Their model is similar to ARM - they will licence the production of the battery rather than produce it themselves. With the evolution of the "Internet of Things" these batteries which are tiny and can be trickle fed by solar cells could be really important. I decided it's also high risk, as they seem to be better at engineering than marketing, so just invested £565.65 on 1,000 shares at 55.6699p. Unfortunately the 5% spread means I'm down £47 until they move upwards.

The second company that caught my eye is TLOU:Tlou Energy. They plan to produce natural gas to fuel power stations in Botswana, a country with a very unreliable electricity supply. They aim to provide power both to households and to a major mine that currently relies on diesel to generate electricity. They are already extracting pilot supplies, and should be in full production in a couple of years. The board of directors have a strong track record, and Botswana is a stable country, with a huge amount of government support for this project. I bought 12,767 shares at 4.1p costing £532.40. As with the share above, this is still fairly high risk and I've decided to limit my exposure to these types of shares to around £500 until I'm absolutely confident, then I will add. There's a massive 12% spread on this one, so I'm already down £65 until that is erased.

Today was a great day for share prices, clawing back about £350 of the £1,500 I lost last week on the portfolio value. Although my FTSE companies did brilliant, I actually had more shares fall in value than gained, so losses in gold mines and other small cap companies took the gloss off the FTSE risers. Hopefully the opinion polls will keep as they are now and continue whittling down my losses, as the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.