Now that we have reached a new month I have taken the opportunity to sit down and review June’s performance for my trades.

Holdings which went up (all companies with good earnings and cash generation)
Mission Marketing (LON:TMMG)
£3IN
Computacenter (LON:CCC)
IG Group (LON:IGG)
Robert Walters (LON:RWA)

Chancers which did OK (more speculative bets)
Arrow Global (LON:ARW)
Duke Royalty (LON:DUKE)
Scapa (LON:SCPA)
Talktalk Telecom (LON:TALK) (short position)
Short position on the British Pound

Losers (I lost money on these)
Provident Financial (LON:PFG)
1pm (LON:OPM)
Countryside Properties (LON:CSP)
Newriver Reit (LON:NRR)

Interesting for me is the majority (80%) of my profits for June have come from the more boring, but higher quality stocks that are steadily grinding up. ‘Chancers’ did ok but I only held small positions due to my risk management rules. Quality stocks I tend to build on and thus hold larger positions.

Losers, well the good news here is I tend to cut losers quickly, if they drop by 4% to 5% I just get rid of them. So overall, the profits from the quality stocks overwhelmed the losers, if nothing else because of position sizing and cutting losses quickly.

I note my quality stocks require very little oversight. Once I’ve made the decision to buy them, there’s nothing to do day to day. Read the odd announcement. I find good stocks are very unlikely to release surprises. In comparison, the ‘Chancers’ while I made a small profit on them, consume a huge amount of my time to firstly research the stock and then enter and track the position daily. If I only held quality long term holdings, I could probably run the portfolio on a couple of hours reading a week.

Does tend to the advice from investors…

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