Sunday times article14 Oct 2018 02:11
From Ian Cowie column in the Sunday times.Even more embarrassingly, I was still buying just before the music stopped. I picked up some shares in a Cheltenham-based engineer, Versarien, which claims to have found a way to commercialise the "wonder material" graphene.Yes, really. This month I paid 177p for shares that were trading at 147p last week, wiping out 20% of the capital invested. Ouch. To make matters worse, I took the plunge after months of watching the share price rise and nearly caught the absolute top; Versarien peaked at 190p.What possessed me? An occupational hazard of being paid to look at shares is that you keep coming across interesting opportunities and I was impressed by Versarien's chief executive, Neill Ricketts. He is a director of the US National Graphene Association (NGA) and told me he had signed a letter of intent with Chinese authorities to equip a factory in Shandong province's "graphene valley". This shows more of a global reach than you might expect from a small firm based in Gloucestershire.More importantly, it suggests Versarien is taken seriously by industrial rivals in both of the world's biggest economies. Ricketts also seems to have impressed when he accompanied Theresa May on her export-boosting trip to China earlier this year.Since then, the Department for International Trade has seconded two senior staff to Versarien, one of whom speaks Mandarin. That's an unusual level of state support for a small business.It is also reassuring to find that shrewd stock-picker Gervais Williams, the manager of Miton UK Smaller Companies and Miton UK MicroCap funds, is a long-term shareholder. He told me: "We expect many of their partnerships to lead to new product launches with plenty of potential to scale up over time."This raises the important point that short-term stock market shocks are very harmful for day traders or speculators but need not necessarily matter much to medium and long-term investors. At times like these, it may pay to remember that shares reflecting the changing composition of the London Stock Exchange delivered higher returns than cash over three-quarters of all periods of five consecutive years since 1899.
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