Steady as she goes – best sums up what’s happened since our last update!
We have bought a few more stocks recently. They include Fortescue metals (FMG), JB HiFi (JBH), C3 (AI:US), and Skillz (SKLZ:US).
Most interestingly, FMG has dropped from above $24 down to $15.32 today but fortunately we had been waiting for an opportunity to buy it and started buying at $20.50 and then more at $18.43. So we have not lost much but it shows how irrational investors can be. However, longer term, they should do very well and I like the forward looking direction they are taking, with climate and energy, to make them sustainable and refine metals in Australia instead of China. That means much lower raw export volumes but higher values.
C3 AI is a leading enterprise AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation and services to build enterprise-scale AI applications more efficiently and cost-effectively than alternatives. Their customers, from large industries to the Defence Department, use these applications for reliability, fraud detection, sensor network health, supply network optimization, energy management, anti-money laundering, and customer engagement. As problem solvers, they are leading innovators that will continue to change the way many things are done in future.
That leads to our performance to date, which despite many volatile trading days on the markets, we slowly continue to grow our portfolio around 4.3% overall. Given that’s really only been since April 2021, with the market hitting highs and bouncing around since May, I am reasonably pleased with the results. We have certainly had some losses but the gains continue to exceed them. As I am still concerned with the excessive valuations of many shares, we will continue to hold a reasonably high amount in cash and patiently wait for shares to reach better values before buying them. But for now, it’s our well diversified approach that has us sometimes rising when the wider market is falling. That’s because there’s usually some individual shares that can be going in the opposite direction as investors are often changing their opinions (even though it’s not rational). You can see the detailed spreadsheet here. The summary below:
The other reports are, IBA here and Bell Direct below:
On the Cryptocurrency front, we were up over $27,000 (from our starting $20,000), but recent selling and profit taking, saw us dip back down to current levels over $24,600 (see chart below). This is to be expected and we hope that the general rise of cryptocurrencies will continue as this is a long term trend that should take another decade to evolve (remembering that Bitcoin was deemed a scam back in 2011 but has survived all the sceptics).
We have now taken a broader approach to trying to find the next 1000% by investing in more cryptos (each one was bought based on the services or ideas they are developing for the future) as seen below:
However, I would like to share the story behind Solana to demonstrate what can happen with cryptos and that caution is needed. This chart shows the unbelievable rapid rise and then recent fall. That’s why they can be both very profitable and costly if you buy when they are too high. I wish it was easy to know beforehand that this would happen but, if I did know, I would probably not need to do this anymore (of course I wont abandon people that I am happy to associate with such as people in this group). So, whilst not holding our breaths, we do have an order for this one around $100 but that means we need it to fall around 50% now. Whilst I prefer a buy and hold strategy, I am thinking that taking profits sooner may be better with cryptos that do a 100% return in a matter of days or weeks? That way we can try to buy it again at a lower price to do it again but the only problem would be if they continued to rise another 100% and we never get another chance at the same price we took profits at. There was a good reason for the recent falls and you can read the Solana news here.
