Week 18 Review

There was a bit left from the loan money which I was saving for potential Christmas costs, but as it's pay day on Tuesday, I decided some of it would be better invested. I added £450 to my standard share account and bought 5,700 shares at 8.3375p of APC:APC Technology costing £487.19. Although APC are making a loss overall, I was fascinated by their "Minimise" subsidiary, which supports companies in meeting sustainability targets. Earnings in this part of the company are doing really well, and with the Paris summit about to chuck loads of money at tightening up companies carbon footprints, this could easily take off in a big way. Worth risking £500 for anyway. Normally this company would have failed nearly all my investment criteria, but every now and again I feel a spot of speculation isn't too cardinal a crime.

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£34,921.04		+£4,660.67
Portfolio value (share price)	£32,700.86	(-£2,098.50)	+£4,364.46
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£31,574.62	(-£3,346.42)	+£4,269.64
Dividends	£150.80		+£0
Profit from sales	£342.88		+£0
Overall profit	-£2,660.67		-£391.03
(Portfolio sale-cost+dividends+profit from sales)

All a bit mixed up with the extra shares. The FTSE 100 was down relentlessly all week, so I'm not too upset that overall performance is only down £391 when there's commission and spread for new shares, and no new dividends or sales. The portfolio has certainly performed a lot better than the FTSE 100 this week.

The weekly performance was helped hugely by TON:Titon holdings. These had lit up my whole spreadsheet greener than just about any other share, but had been running at a £43 loss until this week, when a good trading statement made them surge and they are now at a £195 profit and my most successful share. My other 7 in-profit shares all dwindled quite badly in comparison, and SHB:Shaftesbury went into loss after being in profit for weeks.

Other disasters were WRES:W Resources which were in profit last week and are now back down by £142, and AFPO:African Potash, which looked as if things were improving but is still down £219. AFG:Aquatic food have perked up a bit thanks to a director buying shares. These are still down £413 but I'm convinced will come good when the market's suspicion over them de-listing is proven wrong after a few years of good returns. GLEN:Glencore continue to be a roller coaster and are still down by £834. I'm still keeping the faith - copper will recover at some point!

Here's the SIPP summary

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£3,298.08		+£2,500.90
Portfolio value (share price)	£3,176.13	(-£121.95)	+£2,409.19
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£3,100.28	(-£197.80)	+£2,145.29
Dividends	£0		+£0
Profit from sales	£0		+£0
Overall profit	-£197.80		-£155.61
(Portfolio sale-cost+dividends+profit from sales)

Added two more shares with resulting spread and commission, plus AA:Alcoa is down this week. I was hoping the pension fund would get into positive territory quickly, but given the torrid week it's not surprising it starts in the red.

Fingers crossed next week will finally bring some seasonal cheer to the market...

More additions to the portfolio

The loan money came through late last night, so I was able to add to the portfolio this morning. It arrived just in time, as my failure to sell any existing shares meant my SIPP starter money had come from my bank account, and with 7 days until payday it was getting perilously low. Now it's much healthier.

First off I added £2,600 to the SIPP and purchased the following

HGM:Highland Gold Mining. 2,000 shares at 53.35p costing £1,078.95. Gold is rock bottom but I don't believe for a minute this can continue. Three years ago these shares were trading at 200p before sliding all the way down to 40p in August. Since then they've been recovering gradually despite gold still suffering. When the inevitable turn-around happens, I have high hopes for these shares. Even if the share price doesn't recover for a while, they pay excellent dividends.

UTW:Utilitywise. 1,000 shares at 141p costing £1,421.95. Utilitywise is a business service provider. Basically energy consultancy, which in a time when everyone is trying to use less of it would seem to be a growth area. Profits are up by over 20% a year and they pay a reasonable dividend, but inexplicably their share price has been dropping from nearly 400p in early 2014. I can't understand why. It looks like a good growth company with healthy finances and a market for which there is growing demand. Needless to say, after buying this morning the price dropped by 10% - grr!!

Next I added £4,200 to the share account and bought the following

PAF:Pan African Resources. 20,000 shares at 7.6732p plus £7.67 stamp duty costing £1,554.26. For the same reason as Highland Gold Mining, now seems to be a good time to get into gold. There was also an imperative to buy these quick, as it's ex-dividend day tomorrow and it's a healthy dividend indeed. I stand to make more from the dividend of these shares than I will from my best return after selling stock. I just hope that any transactions that need to happen to secure these have been completed before the cutoff, as I don't know if it's from the moment you do the deal, or whether money has to have changed hands. As mine is still sitting in my bank account, albeit not available, I'm hoping I got them in time. If these go up to just 12p I'll make £800 so quite excited.

LOOK:Lookers. 800 shares at 173.64p plus £6.95 stamp duty costing £1,408.02. I already had some of these which I bought at 179p so the chance to increase my holding at a cheaper price was irresistible. I liked them lots at 179p so I like them even more now.

GVC:GVC Holdings. 300 shares at 399.7499p costing £1,211.20. GVC is a bit like Playtech which I already hold. I believe this is a mega growth area and they seem underpriced. Their share price has been falling since late 2014 but their profits are rocketing and they pay an excellent dividend. They lit up every field in my spreadsheet green, so I had to buy some. It also looks like they may be about to take over another big company, so their growth could become even more impressive soon.

So, Friday's weekly summary will be even more confusing now. Clearly my performance will have dropped off badly. Lots of new spread and commission, and today was a disaster for the rest of my portfolio. Where the hell's this so-called Santa rally?!

Week 17 Review

This week I realised that my maths for calculating overall performance was flawed. I was double-counting dividends and failing to take proper account of money withdrawn from investments. I've changed my approach to keep track of cash in (including dividends) and cash out, and keep the portfolio calculations separate. I'm also undecided about how to keep tabs on the SIPP. I think it's different enough to consider separately, so I'll have one portfolio review and one for the SIPP.

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£30,260.37		+£0
Portfolio value (share price)	£28,336.40	(-£1,802.29)	+£34.40
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£27,304.98	(-£2,955.40)	-£35.92
Dividends	£150.80		+£15.42
Profit from sales	£342.88		+£0
Overall profit	-£2,269.64		+£171.58
(Portfolio sale-cost+dividends+profit from sales)

No new shares in the main accounts this week. Interesting that the share price value is up £34 but the bid price value is down £35. That can partly be accounted for by the increase in spread of AFG:Aquatic foods to a ridiculous 50%. How is anyone meant to be encouraged to by a share with a 50% loss the second they get them?

Here's the SIPP performance

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£797.18		+£797.18
Portfolio value (share price)	£766.94	(-£30.24)	-£30.24
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£754.99	(-£42.19)	-£42.19
Dividends	£0		+£0
Profit from sales	£0		+£0
Overall profit	-£42.19		-£42.19
(Portfolio sale-cost+dividends+profit from sales)

Just the one share in this, and with it being American, I suspect the value is slightly less than showing here as there is bound to be a loss on the currency conversion. The lack of transparency with American shares is troubling, so I think I'll stick to UK shares in future, but it's nice to have one.

The loan paperwork came through yesterday and I got it in the post, so it should be with them today. Hopefully the cash will arrive early next week, as some of the stocks I want to buy dropped in price over the last 2 days so the timing would be perfect for a bit of a bargain.

Time to set up a pension

This week I decided to set up a SIPP

I'd been thinking about why I'm investing. Some of this is for buying my new Honda Civic Type R (in 5 years when they are sufficiently cheap), but some of it is long term investment. I still have 18 years before retirement, and although I have a healthy work pension, if I'm planning on keeping some of my investments for the long term, then the extra 25% chucked in by the tax man makes a very attractive offer.

So with that in mind, I opened a Hargreaves Lansdown SIPP and added £800. That means in January I get £200 from the tax man. I also added a £100 per month standing order so I'll be topping up by £125 per month. In the short term I want to get £10,000 transferred in there as I sell other shares, which will be instantly £12,500 with the tax contribution. I'll reduce my monthly premium bond standing order from £200 to £100 so I won't be any worse off - in fact the tax rebate of £25 is the equivalent of a premium bond win every month!

It still leaves me with £20,000 in the more liquid accounts, and that's soon to be topped up to £27,500 after my bank sent me an irresistible offer of a 3.6% loan. I thought long and hard - my plan is to invest about £300 per month into my share accounts. As I've topped up an existing loan and lowered the interest rate on that too, I'll be paying £288 per month over 4 years for effectively £12,000 up front. That's only about £800 interest over 4 years. Given that I've sold £340 worth of shares and received another £146 dividends (total £486 in 4 months), I'll cover the interest in no time. Why not get the capital up front and use the payments as my monthly investment?

Just waiting for the loan to come through - already decided what to buy with it, so the portfolio will grow again next week!

Another new venture was buying American stocks with my SIPP. I'd been reading up about renewable energy, and the money that's going to be available for development in this sector following the Paris conference. AA:Alcoa make aluminium - but they have been working in partnership on developing aluminium-air batteries. These are getting 1,000km from a single charge, and although there are still loads of issues, they have backing from Renault and Nissan with the research. If this takes off then demand for aluminium will go mental. They have also spent loads of resource restructuring over the last few years, which will hopefully see their share price start to rise again, as they appear under-valued. There's a bit of uncertainty as they may be about to split the shares into 2, so we'll see what happens with that.

I bought 124 shares for the equivalent of 633.2507p at a cost of £797.18. They're down to 611p today so not a great start. Must admit, I do feel a bit blind with them. I was also looking at ABB Ltd, as they are doing a lot of work with batteries, and these will be vital if we're going to rely more heavily on renewable energy. The ability to store energy at times of surplus and release it when the sun goes in or the wind stops will be in high demand, so the company that makes the next great breakthrough in batteries will shoot up in value. However, I need to find a web site with better stats on American companies before I buy any more.

Week 16 Review

What a roller-coaster week. Down, down, up up, up. By the end of Tuesday I'd lost £700 and have spent the last 3 days trying to claw it back. I didn't succeed so I know today's review will be down from last week.

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£30,260.37		+£646.95
Portfolio value (share price)	£28,302.00	(-£1,852.11)	+£592.20
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£27,340.90	(-£2,919.47)	+£578.54
Dividends	£135.38		+£3.84
Profit from sales	£342.88		+£0
Overall profit	-£2,441.22		-£64.58
(Portfolio sale-cost+dividends+profit from sales)

Note the sneaky increase in portfolio value. This was caused by my desire to get it to £30K and the fact I couldn't resist topping up on JLP:Jubilee Platinum while they were cheap. I got another 20,000 to add to my existing 15,000 and paid 3.175p for a total of £646.95. My original lot were bought for 3.71p so are losing £92 but the new ones are only down £8.90 of the commission so are doing ok. I still believe when Jubilee start production they will make big profits, as even with platinum prices falling, they can produce it so cheap.

As it happened I chose the wrong mine to top up. WRES:W Resources went through the roof after they had the permission to mine granted. That was losing 54% and yesterday was up 13% with £25 profit. It dropped 11% today as people sold out, so back down to 2% increase and losing £22 commission. Once they start producing it could gain a few pence. As 1p would be worth £600 I'm still hopeful.

Back to the review, and although adding £646 to the portfolio it's only up by £578 which isn't great. Overall I'm down by £64 this week, which given I was down £700 Tuesday evening is a bit of a relief. So much for getting below the £2,000 loss. Not sure if I'll get that ambition as a Christmas present...

Bad news after bad news

It's only Tuesday and this has been a horrible week.

Was I really saying only 2 days ago how nice it would be if my losses could get under £2,000 before Christmas?

After the last 2 days my losses are only £4 away from £3,000!

Yesterday it was PTEC:Playtec announcing their 2 takeovers had fallen through, resulting in a massive crash of £1 a share.

Today it was PUR:Pure Wafer announcing they were planning to de-list. I was hanging onto them to reap the big dividend from the sale of their destroyed UK factory, and now I'm not sure. The chatter seems to be that we will get back more than the current price. 195p would give me £50 profit but anything less than 179p will give me a loss.

That was a shock, but didn't actually do today's damage. That was due to >4% declines in 6 of my stocks. It's not often Glencore is a ray of sunshine, but a 3.9% rise was nice, and a 12% rise in W Resources was also nice. However, given that these 2 shares have declined by 85% and 32% since I bought them, despite today's rise, they're not really helping me much.

Things are set to get worse tomorrow with a chancellor statement that could cause ructions in the house builder sector. Surely this government are trying to encourage house building? I'll be holding my breath to see if a third disastrous day dawns and my 3 house builders sink even further...

Week 15 Review

My perception is that this week has been generally upwards, but a few shares have tanked, so it may be a false perception. Let's see what the facts say.

			Weekly Change
Portfolio cost	£29,613.42		+£0
Portfolio value (share price)	£27,709.80	(-£1,801.21)	+£219.28
Portfolio sell value (bid price - commission)	£26,762.36	(-£2,851.06)	+£196.89
Dividends	£131.54		+£33.05
Profit from sales	£342.88		+£0
Overall profit	-£2,376.64		+£229.94
(Portfolio sale-cost+dividends+profit from sales)

Although profit from sales is less than last week, it's because I accidentally included dividends from sold shares in the profit. Those have been taken out so there has been no actual change as I've not sold anything this week. For a similar reason the overall profit was missing dividends from current stock and so was a little out. Those have been adjusted this week so it should reconcile properly from next week.

Nice to see another £33 dividends arriving this week, and the overall position up by a few hundred quid. Doesn't quite cancel last week's £700 loss, but at least things are heading in the right direction.

Seven stocks are in profit at the end of the week, and another seven are up but losing commission. If I can get half the portfolio in the green over the next few weeks I'll be happy for Christmas. It would also be wonderful to get the loss on paper down below £2000.