By the way, and it's only a light-hearted thought, I'm no Isaac Newton but if you had listened to the former professional fund manager chat at the choose booze I went to you wouldnt give your money to fund managers.
Talk about socially insecure fantasists. One geezer lectured me on the subject of Fibonacci numbers and how they are central to investment. No they are not, Sherlock.
Basically all of us CPI guys should have offered to be fund managers. What do you get on your investment with them? 5%? Even with the recent downturn I'm still up 100% and I'm hoping for a lot more by September.
The top bookie argued with me when I said it's easy doing this. He had the impression it's a dark art and takes lots of brains and Fibonacci numbers.
The whole fund manager thing is a confidence trick. If you go to enough meetings you will believe anything.
I went to a posh drink up at my bookmakers in the city of London last night. A business journalist made a speech saying that the economy is getting better. Over canapés we punters mingled and it turned out that I was the only one who is just long one equity. All the others think they can guess what's going to happen tomorrow and trade the indices up and down giving the bookies lots of fees.
Although many of them had worked in the city in fund management I left the event feeling very good about just being long CPI using a bit of leverage from the bookmaker to juice things up now that I have calmed down and reduced my position to have necessary safety from external events.
Anyway they thought the strategy was very boring :-)
Much Cheers GoCPI.
I think in total I had 22 long spread bets on CPI as it rose from 20.5p and found it extremely difficult to take the first profit since of course the value of each one had fallen quite a bit by the time I pulled out of my rabbit in headlights performance - due to reaching out and getting your advice.
BUT once that first profit hit my bank account and the rest stayed in cash in my gambling account it got really really easy to close out the other profitable trades and have a lovely cash stash. It was then a warm feeling knowing that my remaining bets which were in loss were likely safe due to the cash cushion.
From now on if I see a bet with £5k in it I'm going to see that as a holiday (plus safety) and not just as pixels on my phone.
The comment about it being difficult to take profits was spot on.
The vast majority of this board is now blanked out for me since I have blocked Aim NF Passmore but I really do owe GoCPI for the advice of a couple of weeks back. I thought I was so clever having made a nice stash on the results so added to my spread betting position not realising how severe the pull back would be afterwards. The advice to cut back and that I had a ridiculously large position really did save my bacon. As it is I have still doubled my money, though of course down a lot, and am seeing it very nicely rise from here. Without this board I would have lost the whole lot. Going to enjoy taking it easy from now on and riding it up to where many of us believe it should go, given the fundamentals.
Thanks GoCPI and all the other sensible posters! Your input has been critical to this naive punter.
February 2022:
"A massive leak from one of the world’s biggest private banks, Credit Suisse, has exposed the hidden wealth of clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes.
Details of accounts linked to 30,000 Credit Suisse clients all over the world are contained in the leak, which unmasks the beneficiaries of more than 100bn Swiss francs (£80bn)* held in one of Switzerland’s best-known financial institutions.
The leak points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds."
My point is that Credit Suisse is very much a one-off. This is not a representative sample but the only banker whoever suggested to me in my career that we take the afternoon off to do wh*res and coke was from... you guessed it: Credit Suisse.
It is perfectly obvious that they have to be sorted out now but that is nothing to do with the rest of the banking sector
Also I would suggest that this time round the regulators and governments are far more on it than in 2008.
This should be worth a few quid to Capita:
'The Chancellor then announced a new policy of "full expensing" for businesses for the next three years to take the sting out of the tax rise.
He said: "That means that every single pound a company invests in IT equipment, plant or machinery can be deducted in full and immediately from taxable profits. It is a corporation tax cut worth an average of £9bn a year for every year it is in place."
Although we are all down a lot of money and deeply disappointed I'm sure at least this company is well positioned as the economy moves to being more public sector- oriented. Yes, no doubt more civil servants will be recruited but to really deliver gritty services it will be necessary to use Capita.
The Conservatives are going to spend a lot in the run-up to the election and Labour will probably increase that afterwards, if there is not an economic collapse.
Capita is very well positioned IMHO.
Also as the firm moves over to AI it may be able to claim the new capital investment allowances that the government is bringing in to counteract raising corporation tax from 19% to 25%.
Let's hope that this panic will blow over with government interventions in the banks as necessary.
Yes I suspect it's unlikely that Ukraine will wind down peacefully and Taiwan will not erupt. The bank failures we are seeing are just a small symptom of the indebtedness of the Western world and the disenfranchisement of the middle class. Then there is the stress of global migration, the fall in the Western birth rate and reliance on global supply chains that are rather more fragile than we thought.
My view is that we are coming to the end of a long period of peace and social harmony. I really wouldn't worry about five years from now, anything could have happened. I hope to make a few quid by the end of the year and simply to celebrate that.
If we are in good economic political and social shape in five years time that will be far more significant than making coin on this share :-)
Well I can't thank you enough Go for your extremely timely advice that I reduce my position. I have saved rather a lot of losses (further reducing since your comment) and am very happy to sit back to enjoy the ride back up. We all know that Capita is a wonderful investment or in my case gamble.
Sadly and I mean this was absolutely no malice whatsoever, we all know also that we should have sold when Aim went long. I was too arrogant to do that, thinking that he had seen the light and all was well.
Outstanding advice which personally I have taken. It was then pleasing to see the share price continue to edge down, but not too far!
I am a total jam tomorrow merchant so being persuaded to get into cash to some extent was good. Got a healthier margin of safety now which means I can enjoy this a bit more and sit back and relax. Still doing 12k a penny so will edge down more if necessary but looking forward to the next leg up whenever it comes.
Yes GoCPI the thing is I am gambling £17,500 per penny on this so I could lose a lot too because I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. All I do is read the other punters' comments on this board. I have never even read the annual report. I read everyone's analysis and multiply that by their track record. As I think I posted before I used to rely pretty much exclusively on Aim who made me a lot of money then for some mad reason he decided to go long.
I will quite likely be buying pints when this is all over.