Eavesdroppers Newsletter - Issue 4 (December)

The latest edition of the Eavesdroppers Dogged Investment Newsletter has just been published on Shareworld.

Featured in this months newsletter are ANITE, FFASTFILL, Renold, LOOKERS and Booker Group as well as an trading update for Lo-Q and Sirius Mining - Featured in previous editions.

Shares Awards 2010

On 11th November Shareworld attended the Shares Awards 2010 at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, as a guest of Redmayne Bentley.

The awards are held every year by Shares Magazine and are presented to the best financial providers in various categories - as voted for by the public.

The evening commenced with a bustling champaign reception, giving everyone a chance to introduce one another - and scout out the competition!

At 7pm all the guests went through to the grand ball room where we were seated for a three course meal and the awards ceremony itself - presented by Ben Norris - UK Stand-up comedian.

The awards over, the guests were invited to participate in a variety of competitive games courtesy of Shares Magazine - these included a "nearest to Pin" golf simulator, clay pigeon shooting (simulator), Blackjack and various others.

All in all the evening was extremely entertaining and we hear that Shareworld's representative thoroughly enjoyed themselves!

Full details of award winners for each category are available on our website - Shares Awards 2010 - Winners.

Blitz, Bust or Boom? Investing for Growth

Read our write-up of Redmayne Bentleys Investment seminar - available now on Shareworld - Blitz, Bust or Boom.

Blitz, Bust or Boom? Investing for Growth

Shareworld attended the Blitz, Bust or Boom? seminar at the Cabinet War Rooms last night (Wednesday 27th October 2010) - Russ Mould and Mark Slater were there to speak about strategies for building a balanced portfolio and how to invest in high risk stocks. It was a very enjoyable evening. There is a full write-up to follow shortly, so watch this space!

Packt Open Source Awards 2010

Packt 2010 Open source awards

CMS Made Simple, the cms framework that Shareworld runs on, have been nominated for thePackt Open Source Awards, show your support by voting for cmsmadesimple.

Shareworld on Facebook

We have launched our custom Facebook business page today http://on.fb.me/9vtfTx - please visit us and be sure to click "Like" to show your support!

Join Shareworld on the popular social networks

We are increasing our efforts to become part of the popular social networking sites, you can help us by following Shareworld on one or more of the following communities:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook 

 You can also help us by writing a review of our website on Alexa.

Fairfax Financial Holdings

Fairfax is a similar company to Berkshire Hathaway. It is an insurance company that uses its capital and float to invest in shares, bonds and other financial instruments. Unlike Berkshire they do not tend to buy whole companies.
Price

Fairfax's main listing is on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE). Its share price is currently C$408, which is US$396 (from this point I'm going to use $ to mean US$). There are 21.3m shares outstanding, so it has a market cap of $8.5bn....Read the full Article - By Dan Tebbutt

StatPro Group

The StatPro Group was founded in 1994 by Chief Executive Justin Wheatley. The company provides portfolio analysis solutions and asset valuation services for the worldwide asset management trade.

Lynas Corporation

Lynas Corporation Ltd, along with its subsidiaries, is focused on the investigation and development of deposits of Rare Earth and additional mineral resources in Asia and Australia.

Bango PLC

Bango is an investment holding company based in the United Kingdom that develops, markets and sells technology which allows mobile phone users to select and purchase directly on their phones.

Bglobal PLC

Bglobal is based in Darwen, United Kingdom and has around 144 employees. Through its subsidiaries, Bglobal provides services and metering technology to deregulated energy markets within the United Kingdom.

Arm Holdings

ARM Holdings–which was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom–is the world’s leading supplier of semiconductor IP (intellectual property)...

Eavesdroppers Dogged Investment Newsletter

We have just published the first edition of the Eavesdropper's Dogged Investment Newsletter - a monthly publication that will be covering the latest market news as well as in depth research on particular stocks.
In Septembers newsletter the Evesdropper has highlighted AFREN, Consort Medical, Chamberlin and Sirius Exploration.

In addition to this the Eavesdropper talks about Royal Bank of Scotland in Straight from the Kennel.

The newsletter is written by Alan Watson, a very knowledgeable stockbroker and journalist.

Read the Newsletter.

Southern Cross Healthcare

Write-up of Southern Cross Healthcare by Dan Tebbutt - A very interesting read highlighting the current problems and the prospect of a recovery. Read the full article.

Shareworld Homepage slow to load

If anyone experienced slow load times on our homepage today we apologise. We had a problem with a news feed from Yahoo that was slowing down the site - we have temporarily removed the feed until we can diagnose the exact problem.

Shareworld Number1 on Nibbler

1174 websites later and Shareworld is still number 1!

Independent Resources

Just published - Company profile for Independent Resources PLC.

De La Rue - Time to Invest?

Continuing a recent theme of my articles (see BP and Rok/Connaught), today I'm going to look at another company that has been beaten down by recent bad news: De La Rue... Read the full article on De La Rue.

Rok Group and Connaught Take a Hammering

Recently two building service firms have announced bad news and had their share prices hammered as a result. Rok Group and Connaught are now both trading on a P/E ratio of less than 3. But are they cheap? - Read the full article on Rok Group and Connaught.

Shareworld Makes use of Cloud Computing

We have started an experiment with Cloud Computing - partly to actually learn how it works, and partly to deliver our content to users faster.

We have signed up for Amazon simple storage - a cloud based storage location hosted by Amazon. We'll use this for storing all of our static content (images, flash etc).

And we've signed up for Amazon Cloudfront - A cloud based content delivery network - this works in conjunction with Amazon simple storage to deliver content to our website from the closest possible location to each visitor.
The idea behind this method of content delivery is that the Cloudfront caches content from Amazon simple storage at multiple server locations around the world (also known as Edge servers). When someone visits the website, the Cloudfront determines which Edge server is physically nearest to the visitors location, it then delivers content from the appropriate server - the theory behind this being that a server that is physically near to the visitor will download content at a much higher speed.

Furthermore, by downloading content from multiple locations, it can be delivered in parallel, thus further reducing download times.

Shareworld No1 on Nibbler:)

Shareworld is the number1 website on Nibbler today!

Shareworld battles for number1 spot on Nibbler

Shareworld is in a battle with bigdotmedia.co.uk and lepointnet.be for the number 1 position over at Silktide's Nibbler - site scoring software.

Watch out - here we come!

Gulf Keystone Trading Ltd

Gulf Keystone Trading Ltd. (AIM: GKP), an AIM listed independent energy company whose goals are to explore, develop and produce oil and gas primarily in North Africa and the Middle East, has announced the beginning of exploration of Shaikan I in northwestern Kurdistan, Iraq. In addition, GKP has exploration rights to the Akri-Bijeel Block, adjacent to Shaikan I. These blocks join GKP's already producing fields at Hassan Ba Hamou, Algeria, as well as its northern Algerian production areas.

GKP has also announced that the first pre-packaged production units have arrived at at Shaikan I and this equipment, together with other oil tanks and a truck-loading facility, will form the long-term basis of a 10,000 barrel output per day (bopd) facility. This startup phase of production testing should last 18 to 24 months and will provide data on the reservoir in this area. This also represents the first testing of the Sargelu oil reservoir....
Read the full article

BP - Follow up - Dan Tebbutt

Dan Tebbutt has published a follow up to his previous article on BP published back in June:

"Back in June I wrote an article on BP expressing my belief that it was "worth a punt" at 400p. I subsequently put my money where my mouth is and put about 10% of my personal portfolio in BP shares at an average price of 354p (you can follow my trades as I make them on my blog). 6 weeks later the share price is at 400p again, but events have certainly moved on. Is 400p a reasonable price, or is BP still a bargain?..."

Read the full article on BP here.

Ocado - Public Offering (IPO)

Ocado, the online supermarket, will shortly be doing an Initial Public Offering (IPO), giving members of the public a chance to buy shares in them for the first time. I like the idea of buying shares in a business I know something about - and I've been buying my groceries from Ocado for more than 7 years, so they fit the bill nicely. Of course, as with any investment, price is all important - I‘ll only be buying their shares if they look cheap.

As part of an IPO, a company issues a prospectus, which should provide the basis of any decision to invest. It provides a lot of the information that a publicly listed company would put in their annual reports, and which aren't so easily available for a private firm....Read on

Shareworld Server attacked by Virus

Our server was recently attacked by an as yet, unknown virus which we believe was sending out unsolicited emails and attacking other servers in the data center where Shareworld resides.

As a result of this, we have been running on an old backup of Shareworld for the last few days. We have now moved to a backup dated 26-06-2010 but hopefully we will be able to recover a completely up to date version of the site in the next few days.

We are planning to FULLY investigate the virus, its source and all the details of this incident so that we can prevent it from happening in the future.

Lastly, we would like to apologise to all of our visitors for any inconvenience caused by these issues.

Shareworld Admin

World Cup Forecast - Group Tables

World Cup Forecast - Group Tables

The scores will be updated as they are played

World Cup Forecast - The Finals

World Cup Forecast - The Finals
The scores will change as the group games are played

BP share price recovers

BP shares are up 7.3% (26.75p) at 392p

BP Dividend

BP, the beleagured oil giant has said that reports that it will defer the second quarter dividend payment are 'wrong'. A spokesman said "no decision has been made"
The Times said BP will defer payment of the next dividend to pacify US politicians. BP has told the paper that it is wrong.

BP Overview

I believe that, in the long-run, taking a contrarian view will generate better returns than following the crowd. So naturally my attention is currently focused on one company above all others - BP. After all, there aren't many firms that have Barack Obama gunning for their CEO, the whole of America up in arms about their environmental crimes, and one of the world's worst ecological disasters on their oil-stained hands...BP Overview - Full Article

European dividend yields exceed bond yields

For only the third time in 30 years equity dividend yields have risen above those on bonds. Yields previously crossed over in March 2003 and late 2008 marking the bottom of the market on both occasions.  

Stocks tumble

Global stocks reversed this afternoon on fears of 'Greek style ' debts in Hungary,US jobs data (non-farm payrolls) worse than hoped, and market rumours that Soc Gen has big losses in derivatives division (I repeat, rumours)

ARM Funds Linux Development

Six big technology companies are joining forces to fund a non-profit company to help speed development of Linux-based software...Read the Full Article

Investing Pitfalls - by Dan Tebbutt

When a bull market is teamed with a booming economy, investing in shares seems easy. The rising tide lifts all shares, easy credit means that few companies run out of cash, and reliable profits mean that any capital shortfall is quickly made up. New investors rush into the market, seeing the profits that their friends and neighbours are making, and looking to join the fun.

Unfortunately, the good times never last forever. The last 3 years have thrown up numerous examples of what can go wrong with an investment - things we should remember the next time the economy booms and the stock market seems to be heading for the stars... Read the Full Article

Spooked by Germans

The markets are going through difficult times with lots of problems in the Eurozone. Germany has just announced it is banning short selling of certain equities, bonds and SWAPS. Markets were spooked by this show of more regulation and maybe it says that some economies are worse than we think.

The next Rockhopper

Shares in Rockhopper went up six times after announcing it's oil discovery in the North Falkland basin.
Several other oil exploration companies have just started programmes that could transform their fortunes as well.
Of course this is all highly speculative, the exploratory drilling being but a tiny step in the oil extraction process. I read that 1 in 6 well will produce a worthwhile result. (in the North Sea I believe it is 1:10). Also drilling in the Falklands are Desire and Falkland Oil & Gas.
Other Oil companies worth taking a look at are Serica Energy, Faroe Petroleum and Salamander Energy.
Personally I like BP. The share price has been well & truly bashed to 530p (from a high of around 650p) and the yield is a healthy 6.9%.

Capital Gains Tax (UK)

It has been fairly widely reported that there will be a change in CGT under the new coalition government. It seems likely that the rate will go up from the present 18% to equal the income tax rates. i.e. 20% & 40% (the new 50% top rate is not expected to apply). Therefore if your capital gains take you over the £37400 higher rate tax band you will be liable to 40% tax.
There is also speculation that the annual allowance of £10100 could be reduced to £1000 or £2000 (as originally suggested by the Liberals).
Strategies that have been suggested to help mitigate large CGT bills are:
Transfer assets between spouses to maximise exemptions.
Sell assets to connected person (maybe company or trust)
Use ISA
Top up SIPP
Use tax exempt vehicles like VCTs or IES.
Remember, though, don't let the Tax tail wag the investment dog!

Geong Trading Update

We have just published the RNS (LSE News service) statement of Trading Update for Geong. Read Geongs trading update here.

php stock quotes

Shareworld now has a stock quotes facility - it runs on hp and enables you to lookup share price, change and recent news for any listed stock.

In addition to entering a companies ticker, you can also enter the company name.

Take a look here.

Drop Down Navigation

Drop down navigation added to Shareworld. Courtesy of cssplay.co.uk.

Hopefully this should make navigating the site a lot more user friendly.

City Confidential Preview

Read Mays edition of the City Confidential Newsletter (now Cityconfidential) on Shareworld.

Shareworlds Blog has been rellocated here!

We have now rellocated our blog to blogspot.com.

You can find the latest information and updates to Shareworld listed here - This will include both technical and informative updates.