Is it the End of Times or the Start of the Greatest Boom Ever?

2016 rolls to a close with the FTSE100 closing on all time high of 7142. So have we hit peak times in the UK or is this the start of something truly great?

When I started investing (or at least started keeping proper records of my investing) in 2007, the FTSE was at 6607. So in the 9 years since, it has crept up just 8%. Hardly an indicator of a booming economy. Of course, we've had the Great Financial Crisis in that time and several other mind-blowing black swans like Brexit, Euro Crises, wars, and terrorism.

Every bit of finance reading I do tells me that it is foolish to try and time markets or even worse do your own stock picking, yet if you had bought a FTSE tracker you'd be just 8% better off over those 9 years. That is truly awful performance for your money. No wonder cash still holds its appeal even with its derisory interest rates.

This year the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness finished up 24.7% - the best year for quite some time.

This result was all due to timing the market - going big with two chunks of money - once in January when markets were nervous about Fed tightening and immediately following Brexit. The rebounds after each drop have been huge and represented excellent opportunities. In January buying anything in the US market was the thing to do while in July buying anything in the UK was the correct option.

I got 'lucky' both times I guess. And so for this year, I can't help but feel we have hit the top and will probably bob around this level for a while. America seems massively over-valued and Trumptimism could be sadly mis-placed - how quickly can he genuinely make changes? And does anyone actually believe he knows what he's doing?

In the UK, there is no catalyst for a boom to come - everyone here is stretched massively by housing costs while business is equally poorly treated by appalling business rates and high rents. Meanwhile savers continue to be pillaged by Mark Carney's ridiculous behaviour at the Bank of England. How does he sleep at night while the pound is ravaged, companies and intellectual property are sold off to the world. Someone really does need to point out to him that currency / exchange rates are only useful to business when someone actually wants to buy your product / service. If you make something no-one wants, it doesn't matter how cheap it is in exchange terms.

This year's massive devaluation was the third one I've experienced here and every time, it provides only VERY short term boosts. Meanwhile it destroys savings, imports inflation, and reduces internal investment. Who knows how Brexit will turn out this year. Maybe that will be the catalyst for a boom? It's a fingers crossed time though and hugely reliant on people in the civil service and government actually caring and doing their best rather than feathering their nest. Maybe we'll see an actual real redistribution of income because of it but I doubt it.

My guesses for 2017:
Cocoa - it was destroyed in 2016 - bound to make a comeback eventually.
Gold - again decimated - got to be an option if inflation makes a re-appearance.
Any decent internet based world focussed company. eg. Boohoo, Superdry, Microsoft.
ITV to be taken over.
Samsung to fire a bunch of people and return from the ashes.

They go down, they go up

Spotted in a telegraph comment on the fractious stock market this week. 

News from a week on the stock market. 
Helium was up, but feathers were down. Paper was stationary, but pencils lost a few points. Lifts rose but escalators continued their slow decline. Switches were off and mining equipment hit rock bottom. The raisin market has dried up. Pampers remained unchanged while Sun peaked at mid-day. Andrex tissues touched a new bottom.

Awful Management, Horrible People

The longer you invest in companies, the more you realise that management are the key to everything the business does. You don't have to look hard to see companies behaving badly in this world. From oil companies, banks, utilities, and retailers - it seems everyone is putting their hands in the till, robbing their customers, destroying the environment or mistreating their staff. Bad management has been mentioned before on the blog and its a theme that needs continuing.

What continues to surprise though is that at the top of companies and in management positions everywhere are PEOPLE. People just like you and me who wouldn't want to be treated poorly, paid badly, or provided an inferior service. As a shareholder, I want the staff in those companies to feel valued, paid fairly, and therefore be productive at work and in their communities. As a shareholder, I want the customers to get great service, buy more products / services and recommend the company to friends and families creating a growing business. As a shareholder I don't want either of the next two examples happening to me.

Just this week (and it's Christmas remember), we've got another couple of examples of terrible management making bad decisions for staff and customers.

First, there's Mike Ashley and his team of thugs who run Sports Direct. The Guardian have produced an expose on working conditions there and detailed how poorly staff are paid and treated. The share price of SPD.L has dropped to 570p after averaging around 700p during the last 6 months. Poor treatment of staff has not just affected Mike's workers but also the millions of people who have shares in Sports Direct in their pensions. This poor attitude to people has cost everyone money.

Secondly, NPower's customer service has been so bad they've been fined £26M. Mental! Had they bothered answering their phone, treating customers with dignity, and sorting out the problems they would have avoided having to pay this fine. As it is, behaving like a normal company would almost certainly have cost them less than the fine - spending a few million more on a customer service centre would have solved most of the issues. NPower is run by German company RWE and routinely loses money in the UK. It's a basket case that should probably be closed or be absorbed by someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm reminded of Seth Godin's writings here. Whatever you feel about Seth, his common sense posts may just be spouting the obvious a lot of the time, at least he's putting these observations into print. A recent post suggested the pursuit of perfection in companies was impossible, the resources required to make small incremental increases in service levels were unaffordable. He called it 'Understanding the Doublings'.

One approach, which some organizations use, is to redefine your usual systems so you are able to please most people without your team going through a Herculean sprint every day, and then (this is a key element as well), eagerly and regularly apologizing and giving refunds to the one in 150 where it just can't be done.

Common-sense stuff. Nobody's perfect. Trying to get there is impossible, but having a system in place to compensate when you can't meet impossible expectations is good business. Your customer isn't put out and your reputation stays intact. This just isn't happening in the UK at the moment. Everybody has given up on perfection - that's fine. But they've also given up on Good, OK, Average and Mediocre. I can think of only one place in the country that has any standards whatsoever in customer service and that's John Lewis.

No wonder people are beginning to seek local over national. Reputation is easier to to ascertain with a local company or person - a few phone calls and you've got the recommendations that you require. Locally a Facebook group helps with recommendations on companies that provide great service and products. A quick post to find out the best plumber, electrician, etc. gets plenty of replies in our community. How are the Sports Directs / NPowers of the world going to compete against that? Answer: They're not. They're dinosaurs that are going to die.

Bad management doesn't seem to be going away in the UK, despite numerous fines and general contempt now commonplace for industries that perennially offend (eg. Banks, Utility companies). Why do leaders behave this way? Would they want to be treated this way themselves? Are they so removed from society they no longer understand how the world works?

For more information on how to behave properly as a manager in an organisation see any of Tom Peter's books or his blog. Putting People First is basically his entire manifesto and would be a great place to start for any manager / leader of a bank, shitty retailer, or utility company.

What does Insider Trading look like?

This!

 

This is Creighton's share price for the last few months this year. You may remember I tipped them as my small cap guesstimate for this year in the year-end review post.  See them plodding along doing nothing until April 19th this year. Then a steady week of increasing share price. For no reason whatsoever. Until an RNS on the 30th April about them selling their Real Shaving business.

How is it possible for the world to know of these events before they are released to the share market?

2014 Year End Review

“I don’t like piggy banks – I’m afraid of change!”

That time again to tie it all up and see if it was worth having my money in equities, rather than sticking it in the bank.

Here's what happened:

FTSE100 fell 2.7%
FTSE100 up 1.3% (total return, GBP)
FTSE-All World up 12.69% (total return, GBP)

Investimouse's fund which is a holding of investment trusts, tracker funds, bonds, fixed interest, and individual company shares is called The Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness. The individual company shares are generally high yielding quarterly paying shares (income is everything) but occasionally I do have a punt on something little. It is compared to the FTSE All-World each year rather than the UK only indices.

The Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness is up 14.76% this year (total return, GBP).

So slightly ahead of its comparative index. Still feel it needs more international exposure, but very pleased to do so well when everyone else is having a bad year.

Slightly annoyed last year about:

- Tesco - Clarke should probably be in prison, along with many of his cohorts.
- Bankers - I hate them all. Crowdfunding and individual finance can't come along soon enough and kill off their corrupt industry.
- The US justice system which continues to pick on BP despite their having made all of Florida an infinitely better place to live. Quite how BP are continually blamed for something American companies and employees caused is beyond me.
- Russia and Putin - madness
- Crawshaw - on the day I had researched it, Crawshaws price was 6p. At the last second I bought Tangent instead as my punt stuck for the year. Tangent earned me 25%, however Crawshaw would have ten-bagged my money. Sleepless nights.

Things I'm looking at this year:

- When exactly to go big on oil again. How long will Putin be happy with just fighting the Ukraine?More than likely his best option is to either rile the Iranians into attacking Israel (big risk) or start supporting ISIL and helping them create a larger conflict in the middle east, specifically by riling them up in Saudi Arabia. More unrest = higher oil price.
- Finger poised on the buy BHP button. Big divs, exposure to energy and all commodities.
- Creightons is my punt stock
- B&M European in retail looks good (I think...)
- Others which have me intrigued for 2015 are CityFibre, Telecity, Shell, Tungsten, Porta, Accumuli

Here's some share tips from round the media for 2014:

Daily Mail - This is Money tips
Guardian
Stockopedia - Top Naps
Independent - Top Ten to Follow in 2015
Telegraph - Questor share tips for 2015 (plus here's last year's results)
iii - Aim share tips for 2015

Some of the other blogger 2014 'year in review' style posts:

DIY Investor
Retirement Investing Today
Investing Sidekick
DIY Income Investor
Wexboy
Adventures in Equities
UK Value Investor


Good luck for the coming year!

And to end a superb cartoon from XKCD:

A quick synopsis of stupid bloody Tesco

Unless your head has been buried in the sand (as mine was last week on a sunny island in the Ionian Sea) then you'll have noticed that Tesco has continued to add manure to the rather large fan it has constructed. The latest revelations? They can't add and just decided to guess how much money they had made in their latest interims.

While I'd like to think things can't get any worse, nothing at Tesco surprises me any more. They're the Barclays of retail now and consequently have the magnifying glass fully turned on them by the media and public. If something is afoot, it will definitely be found out, released and more damage will be done to their reputation, footfall, profits and share price.

I'd say it was time for drastic action. With a new CEO and CFO, take the time to clear the decks and release all the bad news as possible in one day. Sack the chairman who is clearly an idiot for allowing Clarke to eff everything up so badly.

The Previous Idiot

Take the hit, announce the new super plan (detailed below) the following week once everyone on the board of directors has announced they're buying £1m shares each themselves.

My SUPER PLAN of action would be this:

-Turn the Tesco mega boxes into Tesco property developments. Build houses around a typical small suburban shop area - have a Tesco Express, Tesco coffee shop, Tesco hairdresser and a couple of other shops. Make money by renting those and become Tesco Property. Easy.
-It's clear that the UK is now a mostly poor place to live in (outside London). Wages are low and being reduced on an inflation adjusted basis every few months. So it's time to compete with the cheaper end of the market (where Tesco began) and take on Aldi and Lidl, with a budget branded supermarket with limited range. Turn the stores that are in those areas and losing share into the cheaper brand. The rest of them can continue at the middle end in more affluent areas.
-Hire some people at the supermarket management level who actually care about them.
-Address customer service as quickly as possible.
-Tidy the stores up!!!!! Clean the aisles, stack at night, pick up the crap, put the rubbish away and not outside the door....

-Go back to being better than the rest as that's what made the difference to begin with. Competitive pricing, good stock levels, clean stores, helpful staff. This is so bleeding obvious.
-Are the little spinoffs of Tesco making money? ie. Blinkbox, Bank, Online, Delivery, etc.? If not, ditch them.
-Clean up the balance sheet. Start paying off some debt so you don't look like such a basket case.
-Is it possible to have some sort of employee ownership scheme like John Lewis - staff love working for them. Even just making a stand on short hours contracts - ditching them, getting the staff to love you, making yourself look good to the public again will help.

Morrisons and Co-op will eventually die. Sales and profits in the UK will pick up then with less competition. Globally Tesco should continue to do ok, so it's just a matter of time to see this out.

Will Tesco die like Woolworths? I don't think so, but it needs to kill off its weaker competitors as soon as possible.

I'm sorely tempted to buy more now...although to do so would be even more contrarian than buying Russia or investing in Syrian / Iraq housing.

Here's a roundup of everyone else's posts. They are all excellent pieces:

DIY Investor - Tesco Top Up Decision - he's all in again....
Under the Money Tree - Tesco Palaver - staying well clear for now...
Mark Carter - Tesco - keeps revising his valuation down (ahhh the benefit of hindsight)
Mark Ritson (marketing chap) - Tesco risks being famous for being broken - likens Tesco to Nokia, Blackberry, Woolworths and Northern Rock. Very pessimistic.
Expecting Value - Tesco, Yes Again - compares them to Man Utd's recent woes. Excellent.
Share Centre - Tesco's Comedy of Errors -  thinks Dave will need to be bold and do something creative. Big fans of creativity here at Investimouse.

Oh well, it's only one company and nothing's permanent in this world. We'll move on to the next big thing I'm sure...

The TSB IPO - Fancy buying a pukka bank?

The 17th June is the final day to decide whether or not you're participating in the TSB IPO. Once you've downloaded and spent the rest of the day reading the 300pg load of nonsense document you'll be none the wiser about what to do.

TSB is being sold off by Lloyds as punishment for being shafted by Brown and being forced to save HBOS during the Great Financial Crisis, they subsequently went broke and had to ask the state for survival funds. TSB was previously a mutual, then a bank and then succumbed to the excitement of the big bank mergers of the 80s-90s. What we are seeing now is a reversal of those big mergers and a general expansion of the number of banking entities as the new regulators attempt to encourage more competition and fewer companies that are too 'big to fail'.

So TSB - any good?

Here's the GOOD stuff about it:

- It's supposed to be a purely retail bank so no mucking about in the filth of investment banking. 

- It is supposedly being sold on the cheap, at least the PR tells us it is 'priced to go' at about .7-.9 of book value.

- It makes money - about £170M last year and on course for £200M this year.

- It won't be tainted with any mis-selling dramas from the last few years.

- Long term holders will get 1 share for every 20 held each year for the next three years. 

The BAD stuff:

- It revealed last week 45% of its mortgage loans are interest-only. This is INSANE. That's about 45% of its mortgage loans that it will never get its money back on.

- Competition is heating up. Tesco, M&S, Metro, etc. are all chasing new business too.

- Interest rates are on the move up. Mr Carney says so. Expect default rates on loans to rise as they do.

- There is some confusion as to how much they are paying for IT which is a huge cost for banks. Lloyds are currently subsidising / paying for it - when that arrangement ends, TSB will have to pay full whack.

- No dividends until a long time away - 2018.

- They tried to sell it a couple of years ago to Co-op for a boat load less. It wasn't worth £900M then, it's not worth more than that now.

- The market is fairly high at the moment. IPOs are dime a dozen as private equity groups look to cash in at the top of the cycle.

- Only 25% of the shares are being sold. Lloyds will retain the rest and look to sell them all over the next 12 months (I think that's the timeline, they have to sell soon I know). This enormous overhang of shares means there will almost certainly be a better time to buy (if you're keen).

- It's a bank. They can't be trusted. They're almost certainly lying about everything.

More stuff to read from others here:

- Stockopedia says BUY

- Compound Income says NO

- Stockotonia says NO-ish

- The FT says You'll have to hold forever to make some money

- Jeremy Grime, Panmure Gordon says BUY

- Share Centre says BUY

- Yahoo Finance says BUY

Investimouse is staying out of this. There's almost never any way a private investor can make money out of IPOs unless the seller wants you to. Remember, it's a bank. They want your money and they don't care how they get it.

Portfolio Adjustments - March 2014

Over the course of the last month Investimouse has sold out of Tangent Communications (TNG:L), the London based digital media and print company. Results are good, a better dividend is expected this year and they are starting a share buyback in the coming months. Bought at 9.1p, sold at 11.3p - so a rise of about 25%. I hope I don't regret selling early but a recent RNS which stated that there were over £3.5M in phantom options payable to two directors in the coming year spooked me. That would completely wipe out profits in the group and made it a bit uninvestable until those are gone.

Investimouse also sold out of Coms (COMS:L), a superb little earner, which in just over a month doubled in price. Suppose I could have held on for more of the recovery but feel that the valuation had started to get miles away from itself.

To replace these Infinis Energy (INFI:L) is now in the fund purchased at 246p earlier in the month. Think it could be an excellent long term hold for both yield and growth. As an energy play it's always going to be a little at the mercy of government whims but it has decent growth plans with new power plants expected to add another 500MW of generating capacity. It may also end up being an excellent consolidator of all the other little renewable energy firms in the UK.

In addition more money was put into Merchants Trust (MRCH:L) and new money was found for a small stake in Middlefield Canadian (MCT:L) which I hope will be a nice safe high yielding trust. Paying guaranteed 1.25p quarterly dividends it yields at around 5% at the moment which should do me fine for the next few years.

Portfolio Review - 2013

Man,its been ages since I posted on Investimouse. Shame on me. I've still been active in the market and trying to make more money through investing, saving and financial austerity, yet the real world, and work have intervened to stop me posting.

Anyway, how did 2013 go for the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness portfolio?


The fund ended up 20.51% in 2013. Damn pleasing and the best performance since 2010. Considering the number of fixed interest holdings and dividend income shares I have now this seems a very impressive performance. But how did it do against the benchmarks? After all, unless you compare yourself to the market, you may as well have been buying a single FTSE100 tracker or similar.

According to Google Finance:
- the FTSE100 was up 13.9% for 2013.
- the All Shares Index was up 16.2% for 2013.
- the S&P500 was up 38.1%
- the World Index was up 26%. (although I'm not sure if this is accurate - struggling to find a perfect measure).

Clearly the place to be was the US in 2013. I've been gradually reducing my exposure to the US (mistake!) as I felt it was incredibly over-valued. The PE for the S&P is a good 25% above the average and that has to mean that things are going to go wrong soon, or so I thought.

The continuing improvement in the World Index continues to nag me. My portfolio consists of a bunch of investment trusts and low cost emerging country tracker funds that could probably all be done away with and replaced by the iShares World Index ETF.

Investimouse holds its shares in the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness ISA through the iWeb platform. Loads of changes are happening right now due to the implementation of RDR in the UK, basically meaning we all pay a bit more for buying funds, holding shares, etc in our ISAs. I'm sure this wasn't the intention of the good natured law makers but that's what is going to happen to me. I've investigated moving the ISA again but feel that overall iWeb will probably still be just about the best platform to stay with for the size of my holdings. Plus the drama of it all when moving last time from iii to iWeb has put me off ever wanting to do it again!

The last time I had to shift platforms I produced a Google spreadsheet that was a big online hit with people caught up in iii's platform fee charges. This time the good folks at Monevator have an excellent comparison tool that could help you with figuring out who to hold your shares with and place your transactions through.

Portfolio - January 2013 Update

Not much happened during January. Watched the snow fall outside and pondered my navel about what to do with my life now my job has ended.

In the meantime, the fund rolled on and had a nice little tick up from the continued FTSE rally.There was just one dividend payment in January, from Raven Russia Pref shares of a massive £5. Not exactly going to get rich from that! New money was put into the HSBC Pacific tracker fund bumping that up a little.

The really exciting news is that the fund has now fully recovered from the financial crisis and is now in positive territory again.

Of interest in other people's blogs over the last few days:

Mr Money Mustache reviewed his progress in the Lending Club - a peer to peer lending site for business funding. As an early lender with Zopa I found this interesting. However, I couldn't believe the rates he is getting for his money (13% after defaults!). Thinking I might be missing out on something I checked out Zopa (max 8%), Funding Circle (exact rate hidden but guessing about 7.5% after defaults) and Rate Setters today (max 5.8%). None of them have returns even close to the claims in Mr Money Mustache's article.

The Share Centre blog continues to churn out interesting information. Last week's post took an alternative view of what's wrong with the economy, comparing it to evolutionary change, and the need for something out of the ordinary to happen before it can break out of its busted cycle.

McTurra had a nice little run-down of Google+ vs Facebook. As a devout Facebook hater I enjoyed his comparisons.

Just say no to Nintendo

I wrote yesterday that I would be worried about investing in a fund that thought Nintendo was a good buy.

Today, I've found some evidence to back up that initial gut feeling. That article reports from Japan that Nintendo's upcoming huge losses are being blamed on its obsession with Mario. Certainly from the outside it does appear that everything they do seems to have to be attached to the character. A character more than 30 years old now. And he appears in every game they make. And then they make that game over and over again for whatever console they're trying to flog that year. Then they do a sequel to it. And another and another. Then a new console comes out and the whole thing repeats....grrrrr.

Nintendo have real problems. Not just poorly designed rehashes of the same game over and over again. The handheld market has been stolen from them by Apple. No self-respecting parent would buy a 3DS or whatever it's called this week over an iPod Touch. For near as the same price you get a touch screen device with mega cheap amazing games, plus a world of other apps, the internet, email, cameras, etc.

Likewise, the major console market. Their refusal to let the Wii have decent graphics so they could keep the price down could be justified I suppose to shift units but it really shows in comparison to the PS3 and Xbox 360 now. Not allowing their console to have multimedia capabilities like playing DVDs or network movie playing was a mistake. Their wiimote device, while interesting at first, is now laughable as you watch your 6 year old kid beat you at tennis or bowling by flicking their wrist and not even attempting to make the action of the sporting event you're playing. Xbox now own interactive part of the market with Kinect. Everything looks bad at Nintendo. The upcoming Wii U or whatever it is called looks mega lame too.

If you own Nintendo stock, sell it - sell it now. In five years time they'll be a very different company (theme parks, movies maybe, character licensing, some gaming, etc.) but right now you don't want to have to pay for their mess.

Some food for thought on Investing

What makes it the 'lost decade'? A 1.05% return
(Article taken from Observer - 15 Feb 2009)

"Barclays Capital is calling the last 10 years "the lost decade" for equity investors. Its latest Equity-Gilt Study, which analyses investment returns over more than a century, shows that shares produced a return of just 1.05% between 1998 and 2008. Putting that into real money, £100 invested in the stockmarket at the start of the decade would have grown to just £111, even taking account of dividends - a performance well below gilts, corporate bonds and cash. That is the second-worst performance of any 10-year period in the last 110 years - the wooden spoon goes to 1964 and 1974, which produced just 1.02% a year.

So much for the argument that equities are the best place to put your money for the long term. Most people define five years as long-term, so 10 years should surely give shares long enough to prove their mettle. Tim Bond, head of global asset allocation at BarCap, and one of the authors of the study, blames the dismal performance on what he calls the "extreme overvaluation" of the stockmarket back in 1998.

"Although the growth in corporate profits has been robust over the period, investors were paying a very high premium to access these profits at the start of the decade. This has hampered, not to say eradicated, positive returns."

The Equity Gilt Study looks at the market as a whole: retail investors pay fund managers fees to do better than that. Alas, however, that does not always work. Ten-year performance charts for UK funds, prepared for the Observer by Tim Cockerill, head of research at Rowan, shows that some fund managers have done dramatically better than the market, and some substantially worse. In UK Equity Income, for example, Neil Woodford's Invesco Perpetual Income Fund produced a return of 133% over the decade to 9 February, and his High Income Fund was not far behind: at the other end of the scale, New Star UK Strategic Income lost 70% of its value."

1% return for 10 years of investment - gulp. That's terrifying.

HSBC in

After announcing that I was looking at a bunch of shares in a previous post and just waiting for a drop in something before moving, that movement came today.

HSBC plunged about 2% on news of enormous defaults on home loans in the US. This spelled the move for me to go in, and I got some at about £9.09, they've since recovered to £9.16 this evening so not a bad bit of dealing.

While the long term worries about loan defaults rising in America point to their housing boom having busted (why can't it happen here, so I can buy a home?), this is obviously just a blip in the monstrously big HSBC's plan to own the world. Yielding about 4%, I only need one dividend payment to put me above break even on this share purchase. I think though that HSBC will end up being a long term hold and keep me wealthy in retirement, when no doubt it will be called HSBCRBSLLOYDSTSB.

Current Share Portfolio

In my vain attempt to become a millionaire, last year I joined the ranks of people who invest in the stock market. Things have been very up and down in the market for me. I've been reading and absorbing as much as I can but aren't yet a very clever stock picker. For what it's worth, here is what I'm currently in.

Currently I have the following portfolio:

BP, GTL in my Energy section - -13% since inception

National Grid, Rentokil, Std Life in my High Yielders section - + 50% since inception

GPG, Hot Tuna, Tesco in my Growth section - +15% since inception

As you can see I've taken a bath in energy stocks completely and utterly investing at the wrong time. Call it newbie behaviour in not understanding how markets work and how energy stocks are completely tied to commodity prices. Timing is everything with them and I timed it completely wrong. If you want a good tip buy oil stocks now, not back in 2006 when I did!

My High Yielders are going great - not only earning well but up in price too. Should've picked more of them I guess.

Later I'm sure I'll divulge how on earth I ended up with these shares, my philosophy behind picking them and where I think we're heading.