Tuesday, 20 March 2018

No IQE bargains so shopped elsewhere

I could hardly sleep last night with the excitement of IQE:IQE results day, and woke at 7am to read the RNS.

It was upbeat, but not spectacular, which it needed to be for the shorters to give up. Unlikely the price would rocket - but would it fall?

This was it - the tree shake could be about to happen. I logged in and had my buy all ready to submit for when the price crashed to 100p.

Things started off well, with a gradual tick down and then a big 400K sell. This was the tree shake happening before my eyes.

Then it stopped.

I never saw the offer price drop below 132p. That was nowhere near the bargain I was waiting for.

It recovered in minutes to 142p then  spent the rest of the day drifting down again.

It became clear my dreams of really cheap shares had been shattered, so I put plan B into action.

After much deliberation I had decided my plan B was to top up on VRS:Versarien, as this is rapidly catching up OPTI:Optibiotix as one of my favourite shares, and has so many similarities.
  • A CEO with lots of skin in the game
  • Multiple global partners
  • A breakthrough technology with lots of IP and patent protection
  • On the cusp of commercialisation
  • Potentially massive profits
Just as I was about to make the purchase I noticed that MTFB:Motif Bio had crashed 12% after an RNS saying there will be a slight delay in submission of their New Drug Application (NDA) to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), postponing to the 2nd quarter of 2018. That's within the next 3 months!

The reason was to ensure the submission is spot-on, as everything pretty much depends on this being right.

I have no problem with a few months delay, and I certainly have no problem when I'm given the opportunity buy more shares at a bargain price.

I bought 3,092 shares at 32.05p costing £999.94 and happily by the end of the day the bid price was 32.25p so my purchase had already recovered the 2% spread. Unfortunately the 2.55p drop did affect my existing holding, and so altogether my shares dipped from paper profit to an £8 loss. I have no doubts that this is a strategic time to buy extra shares, as commercialisation isn't that far away.

This reduced the pot available for VRS:Versarien, but I was still able to buy 2,821 shares at 78.1p costing £2,212.15. Once again the 3% spread was almost cancelled by the end of the day, with the bid price climbing to 78p. My holding is now making £98 (3%) paper profit.

It was generally a pretty poor day for the rest of the portfolio, with some surprising drops considering the blue day on the FTSE100.  TND:Tandem Group dropped 7.7% and there wasn't a single trade!

The result of all my buying and selling and the slip in prices is the gap between cost and value has widened by £3,007 to £5,998 and portfolio value stands at £71,513 which is about £2,000 less than last week.

The selling has done wonders for my average profits though, with the average monthly profit in my ISA and share accounts  standing at £447 per month (10.7% of portfolio value) over 136 weeks and my SIPP making an average of £385 per month (17.1% of portfolio value) over 120 weeks. £832 a month is way, way more than I could have hoped for and is down to £25,000 profits from sales and dividends since I started. That's almost 50% of the cash I originally invested in less than 3 years.

 Considering some of the utterly stupid mistakes I've made over the last 3 years I'm amazed things have turned out that well so far. Having said that, without IQE:IQE it would have been a different story. Almost half my profits have been from that one share. I guess they key thing is to ensure the other losses are small enough so the very few that really take off get the chance to make a difference.

I hope to be able to say the same thing about OPTI:Optibiotix 12 months from now, although it continues to try my patience rather severely now the bid price is back down to 60p and just can't seem to hold any momentum despite relentless good news.

No more ammo left in my locker now, so if mad things start happening to the IQE:IQE share price, I have nothing to play with...

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