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I'm tempted to buy back in at under 600p, but the other shares I bought when I sold IAG are down too. Only 1 share in my portfolio (MTRO) is up slightly. Just going to sit on my hands for a week to see if the norovirus pushes IAG down more than the other shares to make it worth jumping back in to IAG. I'd definitely come back in if it goes to around 557p.

Lamtree "You would have been better buying a house and renting it out,,I know we've been down that route,,but come on.your money could be making you money."

Buying a BTL is usually a good long-term investment, but it is involves a bit more "hands-on" involvement than purchasing shares in a company. In 2008 I bought a bank repo flat in London to let out. Once we got the keys it had to be fully decorated and prepared for a new tenant. This involved finding a painter, buying a dishwasher etc and arranging to advertise the place to find a suitable tenant. The initial gross yield was around 6.5% but mortgage and maintenance payments bring the net yield to under half of that. The big advantage of BTL is leveraging your money - I put down a £50K deposit and borrowed £120K from the bank at their base rate +0.69%. The initial mortgage payments were expensive, but the BoE base rate soon hit 0.5% making the interest rate on the borrowing well under 2% for the last decade. Rents haven't increased that much since 2008 - initially £875PCM and now £1222PCM. I ask lower than average rents to encourage tenants to stay long-term and the 1st tenant stayed over 8 years (gave me warning that he was planning to retire and move to France). 2nd tenant has signed his 3rd 12 month AST and initially told me he planned to stay there "for about 5 years". Interestingly when the London house prices were flying a few years ago, the value of the flat was increasing each month by more than the rent received! At the peak a few years ago it was worth around £320K but now it has dropped way below £300K again. I found the initial tenant myself and dealt with any problems that came up as I was living about 55 miles from it. Looking after the place is more difficult now when I live 6000 miles from it, so I use a managing agent to deal with any problems. I still met the 2nd tenant in person and showed him round the flat, because as I was back in the UK to celebrate my parent's 50th wedding anniversary. It also turned into a working holiday and I only had about 10 days to arrange for the flat to be repainted and the tiles re-grouted.

If there isn't a buy at 210p (I couldn't see one) then MTRO probably was in an auction period when LSE did a price update. I'm not an expert, but don't shares start the day in an auction period in the 1st few minutes of trading and also have one around lunchtime? I've noticed this happening on other shares I've owned over the years...

Yes, I'm used to seeing a bunch of numbers mentioned in trading statements to give an idea on how the business is progressing. The only number mentioned in this one is how many people they intend to terminate!

Today there are loads of small trades at opening (including a 0 share deal!) You sometimes see this with the auto algorithms, but these are listed as ordinary transactions so done by a human rather than a computer?

I don't know if this is normal for MTRO as I just bought some at 200p this week.

The trading statement is reasonably positive (unless you are one of the circa 1,200 staff who will be looking for new employment). The management team seem to be succeeding with their strategy of winning new contracts whilst controlling operating costs.

I've just bought in at 200p. The share price has been bouncing about recently and recently doesn't stay below 200p for too long before going back up. Hopefully it won't dip and further and it is playing a waiting game for the next few months to see how they are going to turn the company around.

I've just bought a few SAGA at below 50p. I'm hoping their trading update shows that streamlining their business is starting to show increased profit margins and price will bounce back.

I was quite surprised that my limit sell of 647p was triggered this morning - I got 648p. Now don't hold any IAG shares, but may buy back if the price takes a decent dip (goes back under 600p) over the next few months. TBH I doubt it will do this and it will continue to climb fairly slowly over the next few months.

Banked a 45% profit in under 6 months. If only all the shares in my portfolio would perform this well! I've bought SAGA at 49.4p with some of the cash and I'm still looking for something else that could rise >10% over the next month or two.

First thing this morning there were a couple of chunky sells of 65k and 50k shares. A bit later there were 2 big buys of 100k shares. These went through at 134p, which is very close to a new year (52 week) high.

A trading update is due on 28th of January so hopefully they will reveal a continued improvement in earnings. I'm currently up over 50% and had a limit sell of 137p in place. I'm now seriously thinking of cancelling this and see if LUCE continues reaching towards the Liberum Capital target of 160p.

It is in Switzerland. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a28748306/worlds-largest-electric-vehicle-dump-truck/

I switched to diesel vehicles back in 2000 and I still think I'll be driving diesels for at least another decade. I would love an electric vehicle, but I'm based in South Africa and EVs are very impractical here for a few reasons.

1) SA has a has large import duty for cars (combustion, hybrids and EVs)
2) They don't give any incentives to encourage people to switch to EVs
3) The electricity generator here, Eskom, has a monopoly and they cannot generate enough energy to meet demand. It is a long story, but basically they invested in new (coal fired) power stations where they came in way over budget and were years late. They haven't maintained the infrastructure and have multiple faults etc.
4) There are very few charging stations. Tesla hasn't even arrived in SA yet - thery were supposed to open a new showroom in Cape town in Q4 2019, but this hasn't happened yet.
5) Very few EVs are imported. We import the Nissan LEAF, BMW i3 and the new Jaguar i-Pace. I've only seen a couple of LEAFs and i3s on the roads here.

* 77MWh

There is also a green electric dump truck. This 45 ton truck has been designed to work in a quarry where it climbs up a 13% incline empty. It is loaded with 65 tons of ore and uses regenerative braking on the way down. The extra weight means the truck generates more electrical energy on the journey down than it used to get up there, which means it generates electricity rather than using diesel.

Making the trip from quarry to cement factory 20 times in one day produces a surplus of 200kWh of energy (or 77HWh per year). A typical dump truck, by contrast, uses between 11,000 and 22,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year. This is a clever use of electric vehicles and maybe something like this could be deployed at one of the Eurasia mines.

LUCE has been rising steadily over the past few months. It almost hit the year high again on the last day of the year...

Amers, it looks like your share picks haven't gone too well! I was hoping you would confirm that you had a few star shares as well as the dogs.

I've lost about 50% on Saga - bought at around 110p and sold at 55p. I don't like making a real loss and usually just sit on paper losses with my dog shares, but decided to bail and look for better shares that seemed to be undervalued. I bought IAG at 437p a few months ago and made around 43% paper profit plus received dividend. I bought some LUCE this year at 75p and 89p - over 50% paper profit and small dividend. I also bought EUA initially at 2.45p, but I admit I've been doing some trading on them. Each time I sold I made some profit I bought more EUA shares with the profit.

Lamtree, you regularly comment on the BT and EUA BBs and the majority of your posts suggest you have a negative opinion of them (over the long-term anyway). With BT it seems you recently bought some at around 188p and sold soon after at 210p - making a circa 11% profit.

You've previously said you've bought EUA and sold at around 4p. In the past month you have averaged over 10 posts per day on the EUA BB. You have previously said EUA could be worth 8p. I'm curious why there is no mention of you buying back into EUA in the past month. You could have bought at around 2.5p and sold at around 3.8p, to give a profit of over 50% in this time. So have you done some EUA trades in the last month or have you just been concentrating on imparting your wisdow through the 325 posts?

Amers, I'm also down around £3K on MTFB. This was my first foray into AIM and things didn't go well. I've also lost money on BT and Saga in the past, but sold up and bought other shares including EUA that are performing much better now.

Hopefully you also have a few other shares in your portfolio that offset your losses...

Lamtree - you need better advice if your understanding is that a Carp fisher is underwater.

Sounds like you have been following Gary Newman's fishing techniques. I'm not a fishing expert but suspect that Carp fishers tend to keep themselves above the water. It's only the crap fishers who end up underwater! :-)

I still think IAG still has some potential to rise in the short term. I've set an optimistic limit sell for 647p. I'll see how the share price goes over the next month or two and will probably sell if price goes above 637p.

Nice take off at the start of the day. If it was a single buy yesterday it was around 0.33% of the company and if 2 buys it represents around 0.67%.