Goodbye to Ceres Power

I read an update from the CWR:Ceres Power AGM over the weekend and reluctantly decided to sell, as they are showing too many signs of an academic company with limited ability to commercialise their product. There were a few things from the reports that swayed me:

1. Talk of building a new manufacturing plant - that would cost money and I thought they were planning to licence their product not keep manufacturing it
2. I'd been looking at their tie-up with Honda in terms of vehicles but it turns out it's their power generation wing
3. Nothing seems to have come of the partnership with an Asian boiler manufacturer

Maybe I'm still affected by the collapse of TRX:Tissue Regenix share price, the failure of IKA:Ilika to commercialise their batteries and the recent fall into administration of TRK:Torotrak. Add to that my dwindling performance figures and I decided to cash in the profit while it was there.

I really hope I'm wrong, as their proposed model of distributed power generation seems really promising. I'll keep a close eye, as my pension transfer should come through soon and I may well buy back in.

I sold my 21,099 shares for 11.27p making £546.31 (29.8%) profit.

This liberated £2,365.91

I've been looking at the crypto-currency  madness and wondering if there's a way to join in. Out of all the companies involved, I decided BLU:Blue Star Capital had the most potential, so decided to dip my toe with £500. Their share price has been incredibly volatile, and I couldn't have timed my interest more badly. I bought 76,169 shares this morning at 0.667p costing £520 and by the end of the day I could have bought for 0.59p, so with a bid price of 0.57p my holding is down 19% in a day and losing £97. I really am bloody useless!

The rest of the cash I wanted to divide between my favourite two shares, and thinking today was going to be a blue day I bought early.

I topped up another 494 shares of IQE:IQE at 166.6874p costing £835.39 which took my average purchase price in the ISA up to 39.205p - a whopping 30%. That explains why along with the subsequent drop in value today to 161.75p my stats have been crippled and I'm down by about 80% of purchase price today. My timing is dreadful!

The only way I can stomach OPTI:Optibiotix shares sliding below 70p is to try and average down my price a bit more. I bought another 1,515 shares at 66.495p costing £1,019.35 and the price promtly dropped even further to a bid price of 64p. At least the offer price held up at 68p so I still feel like I got a bargain. OPTI:Optibiotix is now 44.2% of my portfolio cost and losing £1,841 making it once more my Nemesis Share, although with a loss of £1,200 JLP:Jubilee Platinum isn't far ahead!

So if you take my amazingly timed purchases along with a general malaise despite the FTSE being up today, my portfolio has lost £1,493 in value. What a successful day!

Did I mention I really hate Christmas!!