Good morning!
I can scarcely believe that it's November tomorrow. I was out cycling in a t-shirt yeaterday, it was so mild. Yet again we're having such mild autumn weather that it must be playing havoc with clothing retailers' attempts to sell us winter clothing. Mind you, the same thing happened last year, so the prior year comparatives this year are actually like-for-like in terms of weather. So any retailers blaming the weather for poor sales this year will be given very short shrift in my reviews here!
My newish Windows 10 laptop has an incredibly annoying tendency to switch itself off without warning when the battery has depleted. This happened today, and I lost the whole section below on SPL. After some swearing & ranting, I remembered the feature on Google Chrome which re-opens recently closed tabs. It worked - Chrome had saved my work! So top marks to Google, and a big fat raspberry noise for Microsoft, quite frankly.
I suppose the next factor for us to all worry about is the US Presidential election. What an absolute farce the whole thing has turned into. I'll resist the temptation to comment further. If the most powerful country on earth can only come up with these 2 appalling candidates, then something has gone very badly wrong with its democracy. America has become a laughing stock - I think they've got horrendous problems over there. Anyway, let's hope it doesn't end up affecting our portfolios, or more importantly sowing the seeds for WWIII.
Let's start today with announcements from 2 companies which have been lousy investments in my portfolio, and the lessons learned.
SKIL Ports & Logistics (LON:SPL)
Share price: 12.12p (up 15% today)
No. shares: 44m (before fundraising) + 376m new shares = 420m
Market cap: £5.3m before fundraising / £50.9m after fundraising
Fundraising & name change - the market cap has collapsed here to just £5.3m. It's been obvious for a while that the wheels had come off, and that all the previous assurances from management were hogwash.
The only surprise is that they've actually been able to pull off a further fundraising at all. So far, the company has partially built a barge loading & unloading port in India. It then ran out of money to complete the project, hence the share price collapse as people dumped their…
