Busy days

Since the last week in January I have been active. I have gone from a portfolio that was half empty to one that has almost no cash. I have a rump of my gold and silver, which is doing very well and represents 9% of my portfolio. I still have that position in cattle which is languishing. I had the opportunity to take a small profit a few days ago but didn't and am now showing a small loss. A big part of the problem here is currency loss. I shall not keep this much longer.

78% of my portfolio is in equities some doing well and some doing badly. In the UK I have three strategies.

• The first looks for shares that have a low prospective pe ratio; a high prospective earnings per share; positive revenue growth; have out-performed the market in price movement and that out-performance is accelerating; they must generate cash flow more quickly than earnings. Picking shares on that basis has generated a profit of over 4% in  a week.
• The second is my surfing strategy which I have been running for about a month, this has generated just over 3% in a month with most of the profit realised
• Finally I seek out high valued stocks in growing sectors and these have generated 1.8% in about three weeks 

I am happy with these returns since the bulk of the profits were made in a period when the market went up by less that half a percent.

I also did well in Hong Kong where I sought out shares with a decent value profile but which had suffered a collapse in price. Here I made almost 3% in a little over a week while the market made 1.5%.

The big disappointment was the US where I looked for  high valued stocks in growing sectors and for small cap stocks that have suffered bad price reversals and they have left me with a loss of 9%. I am holding on because these selection strategies have worked well in the past through thick and thin. If they do not start to perform I will have to do a serious debrief to see what went wrong.

Using my surfing strategy in the US was also a failure. I lost about 1.5% in a month.

Today's graph shows how my surfing strategy works at its best. I look for shares that are trending upwards - shown by the middle blue line. I then pick those which are at or near the bottom of the channel representing a movement of 1.5 standard deviations (the dotted blue lines). I like to see a high percentage movement back up to the trend line. In this case it was 9%. I bought at 125 on 25th January and sold at 133 to realise a 5% profit after costs in ten days. I could have held on to the top of the channel but I had no way of knowing it would get there - it did not before. I think I am happy with this type of trade and will increase my stake to reduce the impact of costs