SCARY DAY!!

Hi

despite a valiant effort by the FTSE ending up at 6044 my portfolio took a serious hit today for the first time in over a month. I'm around £200 down and, yes, it's very painful. A lot of my positions are in oil and gas, gold, copper,etc., and all of these were seriously down today - just one of those things I guess. This is the problem with AIM shares: you can make big gains very quickly but, of course, they are, by nature, extremely volatile...

Anyway, despite the massive fall, I am not downhearted; I have seen this happen a few times before, even in my short time as a spread better. It's just the way it is, 2 forward, 3 back, etc., etc. One of the reasons I like to have such a diverse portfolio is because, even on a really bad day, there will always be a few positions that shine - believe me, it could have been much worse!

I had 3 stop outs today: 2 of these were actual stop losses, the third was a position that I decided to sell at a profit...

SIRIUS MINERALS x 2 stopped out for a combined profit of £17.30
ARIAN SILVER CORPORATION I sold this am for a profit of £47.80

I decided to sell ARIAN SILVER because of impending bad news (which materialised but nowhere near as bad as expected). In fact I still have another 2 positions in ARIAN so I'm fairly happy about it. Perhaps I should have 'kept the faith' on this one and, in fact, it was touch and go; however I made an 'executive decision' that if it fell below a certain level I would take some profit - which is what I did (by about 0.5 point!). So, £50 profit and 2 remaining positions is a reasonable outcome...

As I've indicated most of my portfolio was a blood strewn battlefield - lots of RED!
The few survivors had moderate gains sufficient to keep my head above water. The best performer today, and yesterday, was NAUTICAL PETROLEUM PLC which is now 436 SP. This position, despite a very shakey start, is showing a profit of £80 at just £1/point.

I'm calm and I'm collected and I've managed to shake off my temporary bout of impatience. Tomorrow will be better... see you then, Big Al