Member Info for Jurado

In other news announced today, Spirit have started producing at their Norwegian Oda site five months ahead of schedule. This is put down to "efficient drilling and cooperation with suppliers". Hope it goes as well in Warwick.

Nice puff piece in Rotherham local press today - the company now claiming xfiltra could be bigger for us than XOrbs, and that deals are coming this year. https://www.thestar.co.uk/business/rotherham-laundry-firm-set-to-clean-up-with-new-plastic-pollution-filter-1-9628169

"So where does a dividend to shareholders come from here?" - Have always thought if we ever are to get a dividend here it would be in form of special divi in the wake of one of the "blockbuster exits" we were taking about earlier. But not convinced it will ever happen.

"they need to release more PR updates to keep a more positive profile to maintain shareholder interest."

True, but there have now been four positive rns based on clinical progress already this year - so things have started to improve.

RNSS says first patient dosed in phase 3 trial for Ridinilazole. Going to take two and half years for the full data so patience as well as patients required, but there's every reason to hope this will do the job. I hope something else in our pipeline will come forward to keep the interest levels up - gonorrhea drug sounds promising and necessary.

"A blockbuster exit would help." I hear ya. Oxford Nanopore is the obvious candidate I suppose. Neil Woodford - not in fashion right now I know - remains very bullish on this with saying that with it's rapidly growing customer base and increasing global reach "We are very confident that the company is poised to deliver strong growth in the years ahead." I don't thing IP wants to hang around for years ahead, but obviously also it will wait until it can get a good price.

Last June our 18 per cent holding was valued at £274 million- some five times larger than our next most valuable holding. So it's pretty high stakes. But I take your points about management here - a sign that there was intention to return value to shareholders would be welcome.

Because we discovered our DMD drug did not work. You can find out more by looking at the RNS feed for the time.

Seems it took a day for the penny to drop but I'm sensing a change of sentiment here. Up 13 percent so far - no huge volumes and there might be some selling in the afternoon, but overall - considerably heartened.

I'm actually rather excited by this update, more than the market anyway. Ok it's not quite an oil discovery or a successful stage 2 results for a wonder drug, but as an LTH here it does mean the growth predicted for the company over the last four/five years is actually starting to materialise. When our income is just a few hundred thousand, you know that even an 80 per cent growth in sales is still going to leave us a tiny company and projections of $20 million income seem very distant. Now an 80 per cent growth in dermapure alone takes us from 1.9m to 3.4m - and overall we are up to 11.6m revenue. In other words - we may not be in profit yet, but it's happening people It's happening.

I'd certainly wake up if we hit 90p - though I'd need 300 to break even. Oh well. Remember we should have the retinitis results by the summer and that could lively things up if it goes well.

Given our recent discussions about expansion I suppose it's hardly surprising that we've had a fundraise. Always a bit of blow to see the sp sink towards a discounted placing price but at least we can be fairly confident that all this money is going to be spent towards delivering on big new contracts - and at whatever timeline you look at, the business will only thrive if we can do what we promise in a timely manner. So I hope no-one is put off by this drop - it looks an obvious requirement for future growth.

[Warning: lightweight anecdotal investing report follows - please feel free to ignore]

So, when I found this company around six years back I was really fascinated by the idea of investing in it and in its portfolio companies as they listed. A great way to support British innovation and make some money along the way. A few years on, the companies I backed were really not doing so well - a reasonable gain for Ceres Power was heavily outweighed by big losses at Modern Water, Tissue Regenix and Xeros (though the latter two at one stage had more than doubled for me).

I've sort of got faith that overall these will come good but I was prompted to play a little game and about 6 months back created a fantasy portfolio of eight other listed IP Group portfolio companies to see what happened. The short story is that the fantasy portfolio fell rapidly by 20 per cent, but in the last month has climbed back and recouped those losses and is now nearly level.

Within that, the story is of substantial falls for Diurnal (“development of a novel approach to drug delivery”), hVIVO(“viral challenge and virometrics specialist”), Mirriad Advertising (“native in-video advertising”) and a smaller loss for Deep Matter (“ONTO and Visarc surface modification technologies”), which have been counterbalanced by big rises for Avacta (“diagnostic tools, consumables and reagents for life sciences”) and Ilika (solid state batteries). Actual Experience (“cloud-based analytics as a service”) and Ixico (“support technologies for researching and treating serious illnesses”) have remained pretty much the same.

So what have I learned? That early stage AIM companies are volatile. That a portfolio helps cover your losses. In other words, nothing I didn't know already. But at least I've got some confidence that small, tech-led companies can be profitable as well as uplifting and exciting. All you have to do is pick the right ones.

Well true but not the whole truth. The SP fell to 10p, at which point we all had a chance to load up - I doubled my holding - and it has quickly doubled to 20p, which was good news of a sort. The point about cash burn remains pertinent though.

University academics? Marks Nicholls and John Samuel? I think that will be news to them. Look, I'm just some chap on a forum and know little about building a business but the bulk of the research costs are largely sunk now (its nearly 13 years since the spin-out), and the whole Symphony project thing is to get away from heavy capital costs (hence the board's "IP-rich, asset-light" mantra). There's reasons to think they can do it - and the nous of university academics is not one of my worries.

Well let's hope so. I was glad when he turned to the recruitment programme because I was thinking we would struggle to deliver if all these larger, complex projects came in. Must be hard to get that right - no-one wants to pay people to sit around waiting, but if a £100m project does arrive, we need the engineers in place and ready to go.

Well now I've seen it, it 's very exciting. Since first I invested here people have complained about jam tomorrow, but if only half of the systems business jobs Simon outlines come in, then our bread will be very nicely buttered. If you can't be bothered to watch it, that would be around $150m - or nearly three times our mcap.

Erm well it's nearly doubled in three weeks. Is that what "junk share" do? Maybe, but the only real answer is to look through its history and read the documents. I'm not going to do all that for you, but briefly - this is about disruptive technology with all the associated risks. It was ludicrously overvalued at 300-odd and was incomprehensible o me at 10p.

The company is trying to shift towards a licensing model - if it can expand and then move beyond the hotel market and into domestic then 20p will be very cheap. If the tannery side takes off then we'll be worth a whole lot more too.

It's a serious business - and the ever-increasing concern over water is a big reason for being involved. It may or not take off big time but it has already come a long way. It's a proper business, so junk share is hardlyvan appropriate term, but yes risky. I think 2020 will be a more exciting time than 2019 - so a good time to get in if that seems right for you.

Good news from Diurnal today. Currently up 186 per cent on today's RNS about a US patent - though strangely the company is saying they know of no reason for the rise. This comes after a fairly precipitous decline in recent months - but we own 43.6 per cent so my back-of-envelope suggests our gain today is very nearly £10million. Now, if TRX can take off...

"any descent is seen as heresy. " Yes, ridiculous isn't it? Descent should surely be what mining stocks are all about.

[Wouldn't normally make a joke about typos but , y'know, open doors and all that...]

September's figures showed by we'd got about 12 million in the bank with about £4 million cash burn every 6 months. With revenue increasing at 61 per cent (at least, hopefully) that should just about take us to our 2020 breakeven stage but it could be close and a fundraise is an obvious possibility. If I had any spare I'd definitely be averaging down here - I could have more to invest by April but I doubt we'll be 6 or under then.