Hold onto your hats

Hold onto your hats.

Amazingly the Lloyd's purchase is paying off - so far. I am sitting on a net profit of 1.7% after four days despite yesterday's pull back.  I guess it will all vanish tomorrow. I need to monitor carefully because it is a share with no fundamental virtue. Its price is subject to political interference - this does not make for a happy holding. It will be a case of take the money and run. I might have done that yesterday but was out all day with our Australian guests. For the time being the price is being pushed and pulled by the market and that is why I think the paper profits will disappear today. We are still in that ghastly channel

Hong Kong is much the same. Price fell to the level where I had made the judgement that it would bounce back and in a valiant effort to put my money where my mouth is I put in an order to buy a batch of shares on Thursday night. Since I expected a strong rebound I put the buy limit at 1% above the closing price of the previous day. All my orders, with one exception were filled. The exception was a share that sprinted upwards and made a 4% rise on the day. That share (330) has continued to rise The shares I did buy made no money the first night but with the big rise on the Dow the next day they made money on Monday. The money was lost on Tuesday overnight after the Dow had lost ground.

It is beginning to look as though the new resistance line that I had failed to spot previously (I have marked it on the chart above) is the important one. With that new line in place I'm beginning to wonder if we are going to have a repetition of the last pattern of consolidation. If this happens the next move is a sharp fall to the bottom of the channel and support at around 11500 with the risk of a breakdown. This is guesswork but I still think it's time to hold on to your hats.

I was not at my desk yesterday because I took my guests to Swindon. Swindon? you may well ask. But Swindon has used part of its old railway workshops to create a massive cut price retail outlet - boring but big and lots of ladies like it - and another part to create an amazing museum dedicated to display the story of the building of steam locomotives from the nineteenth century up to the 1960s. Over 20,000 people lived and worked there for several generations. The museum is called Steam and whoever designed it did a fantastic job. There are short film clips that show interviews with men and women who worked there as well as pictures of the frightening machines they operated. Those machines are there and there are massive examples of the locomotives they built. I have taken two lots of visitors there and in both cases they were enthralled.