Victoria Oil and Gas VOG

A little bit of movement today so I sold some of the shares I bought last week for a small profit. I have put a buy order in to replace them at 3.65p but we will have to see if that gets triggered. One thing that I have noticed is that since I haven't been trading very much, my rate with TD Waterhouse has gone back up to 12.5GBP rather than 8.95GBP which it has been for 6 months.So, my desire to trade is driven also by what it is costing me, I have to do 15 trades a quarter to get the 8.95 rate!

I am very tempted to buy some Fyffes FFY shares tomorrow as their interims are on Monday! I don't suppose I will but if I don't then they are bound to have good results and the sp will rise! Another company that I am following is Goldplat GDP and I see them rising in the next couple of months but I need some dosh to buy them at 12p a share. Good to see Edenville starting to move slowly upwards. I have a sell order in for 1.02p so I may get lucky in a few weeks!

Greencore Group GNC

Well, things are certainly starting to move now. Yesterday there was a flurry of RNS and to cut a long story short, there is no problem from the Irish Government regarding the takeover and all the Rights issue has been sorted. So we ar just waiting for the deal to be formerly signed and the merging of the companies to begin.
UNIQ has a the closing of a factory prior to the takeover and this is a factory that produces own brand desserts. I found it interesting that UNIQ produces Cadbury and Muller desserts. Also, my shares have now been amalgamated under one heading on my TDW account although shareprice.co.uk still seems to have difficulty getting it sorted.

I want to keep building my holding in this company as it seems well run and pays a reasonable dividend.

Today I have put a buy order in for TSTR with a view to massively increasing my holding. I have a limit order for 0.75p so we will have to wait and see. I have set it for 25 days but I think that if it doesn't trigger soon then it will be too late as I believe that after the end of August, these shares will start to rise.

Berkeley Mineral Resources BMR

Ok, so it is a really bad day on the markets and BMR is down. Tomorrow 145M new shares will be released onto the market so I decided to sell my BMR shares and try a short on BMR for today and then close the short tomorrow and buy some more BMR shares cheaper. Unfortunately, TD Waterhouse don't do short selling so I have sold my BMR shares at a loss and now hope that I can buy them back tomorrow at about 3.9p so that I end up with more shares! Will it work, I don't know but I feel it is worth a try!

I have had some more RNS today, I from BMR saying they know of no reason for the sp to drop! Perhaps they aren't aware of the effect of dilution on share price!

The second, I didn't actually receive but found on the LSE BB, and this was the 6 months results for PINN which were very good. Sales up, profit up but the sp didn't do anything much:(

Then one from Red Rock saying that Jupiter Mines had started a feasability study and also saying that their issue of equity will take place on 30th not 29th of June.

Finally, I had 1 from EDL saying that Nomura International had increased their stake in the company.

So all in all, a lot going on when there was chaos in the market. In fact I am thinking of staying out of BMR all together as I have lost confidence in the company.

Viridas PLC (VIR)

I'm afraid I couldn't help myself yesterday, the sp of Viridas was moving up and I cancelled my sell order and sold all of my shares. I bought at o.35p last week and sold at 0.6181p yestreday netting £650 from an investment of £882! Because it was Negotiated Trade some of the time, I put in a limit order for 0.58p and went for a cycle ride with my son. When I came back TD Waterhouse had sold them at 0.6181p, so well done TDW! In hindsight I might have made an error because I could have sold 148k shares and kept 100k shares riding free but what's done is done. Better than putting my money in the bank!

Yesterday, there was a lot of excitement about what info may come out of the mining conference where Masoud Alikhani was speaking. The general belief is that the deal is almost done, the money and paperwork is in escrow, and an RNS should be issued next week. Based on that information I increased my holdings in Berkeley Mineral Resources and have put a sell order in for 10.5p, to sell about two thirds of my shares. I intend to top slice these shares come what may as I haven't achieved that yet!

Yesterday was also the AGM of Tristar Resources and they intend to be in full production of antimony by the end of 2012! They are doing some more drilling testing and the results will be available with their interim results on 30th September! We will have to wait and see what happens.

Today's RNS

I received 2 RNS this morning, one for Greencore and one for Pinnacle Telecom. Interestingly, nothing for BMR!
 The Grenncore RNS was to say that Sheffield Asset Management had increased their stake in the company. This was only a small increase but I think it is always better that someone is increasing their stake, showing confidence, than decreasing!

The Pinnacle Telecom RNS was to say that they had another contract for T in the Park in Scotland and that they had successfully completed their Chelsea Flower Show contract over the weekend. This had the effect of moving the sp up a little this morning but I don't see any major rise happening until after their results at the end of June.

The big movement this morning was Viridas who were up 24% at time of blogging and that without an RNS. There is something brewing because all the trades are still being reported as sells and on my TD Waterhouse account any dummy sell is NT only!! I have put a limit order in for today only of 0.75p to topslice my shares, if it sells I will be running on free shares. We will have to see!

Tristar Resources TSTR

When I looked at my TDW accounton Tuesday I found that I had some spare cash!! So I re-bought some Tristar Resources TSTR shares at 1.16p.In my opinion this share is going to boom in the near future. In view of the way China is limiting its exports of rare metals and at the same time increasing the prices, when Tristar Resources TSTR start producing its antimony the sp will move sunstantially. I want to increase my holding now before the sp starts increasing too much. However, to do that I have to sell some of my other shares.
The shares that are causing the most frustration are Victoria Oil  and Gas VOG and Porta Communications PTCM. VOG are STILL waiting for their licence to be signed in Cameroon and with PTCM I am waiting for them to announce an acquisition. The sp of PTCM has dropped from a high of 0.35p to 0.15p in 2 months and I am sitting on 1.6M at 0.24p average so I am not wildly excited. I don't want to buy any more because they are nearing 25% my portfolio.

BATM Advanced Communications BVC

This morning was the year end results for BATM Communications. I checked onto the LSE site at 9.00am French time and saw that there was an item of news for BVC. I clicked on it and found a report from Reuters that BATM results were not good and they were not going to pay a dividend!! So I quickly got onto TD Waterhouse and sold my shares. I made a loss of £24 but that was a relief as the sp fell below my sell price and the likelihood of it improving soon is not great.

I was then able to put that money into Orogen Gold (ORE) where I bought some shares at 0.96p. I have been following these for quite a while as MVC but they changed their name today so I thought that might be an omen!!

Victoria Oil and Gas VOG

I have sold my shares held in my HSBC account. My sell order ran out at the end of February so on March 1st I said sell them at 5.2p. with a limit of March 4th. Much to my amazement this morning it appears that I sold them on March 1st. HSBC France charged me £155 to sell them, so you can see why they are making so much profit. Anyway I made a profit so that's the main thing.

I transferred the money into my TD Waterhouse account and bought just over 600k shares in Porta Communications to bring my holding up to 1M shares! Small beer in some people's eyes but a milestone for me. I have already made some money with PTCM and once their website is up and running and news of acquisitions is released then I am confident that the sp will rise. I bought my first lot at 0.29p and they rose to a bid of 0.33p so even if they got there I would be doing OK as I bought at 0.2419p this morning. However, my sales target is 0.5p.

With the rest of the money I topped up on my Tristar Resources shares.I am excited about this company as they have found antimony in Turkey and have a possibility of gold as well. I hope that they will soon issue an update on progress as this share could move swiftly. On results of its test results it hit 1.35p whereas I bought this morning at 0.96p. This is something to watch and hopefully make some money on.

1st birthday of share trading

I started trading exactly 1 year ago when I bought 1000 GKN shares for 105p and sold then in September for 180p. I then transferred the money to my TD Waterhouse account as the cost of buying and selling was much cheaper than through HSBC in France. To start with it was costing €200 to buy or sell shares in London. To buy or sell shares in Paris was €10 but I also had to pay €22 “droits de garde” to the bank. All in all I felt I was getting ripped off by HSBC.

To start with I was charged £12.50 for each transaction with TD Waterhouse but after the first 3 months that reduced to £8.95. Also I can buy or sell on the internet whereas with HSBC I had to ring up each time and go through a whole load of rigmarole to buy or sell.

I still have 50000 shares in VOG in my French HSBC account and I am waiting for the sp to hit 10p. So it was a bit of a shock today when the sp fell to 4.3p before recovering to 4.8p. Other than that every share was down except for TSTR which at one point touched 1.24p from a close of 0.94p the previous day.  NOT a good day but I am hoping that soon I will be in profit in most of my shares.  I now have 9 different shares covering 9 different sectors so I am happy that I am spreading the risk. From an investment of £1000 my portfolio is now £13000, some by organic growth but most by adding funds.

I hope that 1 year from now I will have doubled the portfolio to approx £25000. Watch this space!!

The Irish problem

It has been very sad watching events unfold in Ireland,  when it is ordinary people who are picking up the tab for greedy, incompetent bamkers.I transferred some Euros to my TDWaterhouse account with the intention of topping up on Greencore shares. They are issuing a final dividend and the cutoff day is 3rd Dec. Just before I placed the order I thought about buying some Bank of Ireland sharesBKIR, as they had dropped from their spike to 50c. However, I stuck to my original plan and bought GNC. I was relieved this morning when I saw that BKIR shares had dropped from 37c yesterday to 34 after all the shenanigans that went on in Ireland last night.As I write they have now dropped to 33 and are likely to go lower. I feel the pain of the guys on the BB who are losing money like water flowing through your fingers.It seems that if you are shorting BKIR then you are  making money. I have never tried shorting, its contrary to my nature but it seems that is the only way to go for BKIR.

What an interesting day!

I woke up this morning to find that the telephone and ADSL were not working. Rang SFR to find there was a problem with the line and they were working on it. I had no idea what was happening in the markets until the afternoon when it came back on. Then I found that VOG was up to 5.6p but more interestingly Sunrise Resources SRES had been over 2p in the day. Yesterday I had a sell order for 1.9p just for 1 day. I got on to TD Waterhouse website and put a limit order for 2.1p. I checked several times and althought the Ask price was over 2.1p the Bid price wasn't. I wondered whether I should cancel my order  and sell at market but I decided patience was better. I didn't need to sell the shares so I could afford to wait until it hit my target. Next time I checked it showed that the order had been executed and I had made 42% profit on a 6 week investment. I was very pleased, much better than the bank!
At the end of the day VOG finished at 5.77p which was very pleasing but Edenville Energy had been the second highest traded share of the day with 2 delayed trades  equalling 78M! However, the sp hadn't fallen much but it does beg the question - what is going on?
Now the key thing is what to reinvest in. I am torn between Leeds Petroleum(LDP), topping up Edenville and buying Bank of Ireland(BKIR). So far I have decided on BKIR although I may change my mind before the market opens on Monday.