Speculative Sacrifice

I made a huge sacrifice this morning and sold one of my best shares in order to pursue a share I've been watching for several months.

CRL:Creightons was a very small investment of £411.44. It's a very small company - in fact microscopic. It has however performed amazingly well, and I sold my 5,000 shares today for £815.55 which is a profit of 95.7%.

I sold because they are so microscopic, and although my aim is to try and hang onto shares for longer, and although the P/E ratio is still less than 8, giving this share the potential to double again, I decided for the amount I'd invested, the profits were great, and there's another share I'm desperate to own right now. Timing is of the essence for my target acquisition, so I decided a sacrifice was required.

There's also a part of me preparing for AFPO:African Potash de-listing. The shares suspend tomorrow, and if I lose my £700 investment I need a buffer to protect my performance stats. This gives me a £400 buffer.

The share I've been watching is NANO:Nanoco Group. They are loss making, but have been developing the ability to supply and licence quantum dot technology for using as TV, monitor and mobile screens. Initially this will be at the high end of the market for ultra HD, but is expected to filter down through the price ranges to become standard over time.

Merck and Dow are already licensed to manufacture the product and are building capacity to potentially supply all major TV manufacturers, as are Nanoco themselves from their own production facility.

I've been scratching my head for months as the share price continued to plummet despite the immense potential of this market, and the effort that has been put in place to commercialise the product. Why had the price dropped to an all-time low just as revenue could start coming in?

I received an RNS alert yesterday as a holder of LGEN:Legal & General shares to say that they had purchased >3% of Nanoco shares. That was my green light. Price at an all time low for no reason I could explain, then a major institutional investor going straight in with a huge purchase. If I was going to buy into this potential, then it had to be this morning.

I purchased 2,164 shares at 36.9688p with £4 stamp duty and my commission charges which have gone back up to £11.95, costing £815.95. Slightly frustrated to notice afterwards that there are £45 of dividend payments in my cash account that haven't been transferred and which could have upped my investment had I noticed them beforehand!

Very happy to say that the share price increased by 4.8% today, so with a bid price of 38.5p I've cleared spread and commission already. Now let's just hope the price stays on the upward trend for a while...