Good morning! It's Paul here.

Please see the header for the announcements that I intend reporting on today.

Do let me know, in the comments, if you spot anything else interesting.


Market comments

US markets were wobbly again last night, so we're probably likely to suffer more pain today in the UK. Such is life - corrections happen from time to time.

It seems to me that this market is now throwing up some bargains. Quite a few of the stocks that I own, or are on my watchlist, have reported good figures & outlook, yet in some cases are now 20-40% cheaper than they were only a few weeks ago. That doesn't make sense to me. Maybe they were over-priced to begin with, but not that much.

The falls in price have generally happened on lowish volumes, in most of my small cap stocks. I find that reassuring. It's a combination of a few nervous small shareholders selling up, and a buyers' strike because of concerns over the US markets falling, Brexit, Corbyn, Italian/Eurozone crisis, China, trade wars, and anything else you can think of!

In one extreme case, a very illiquid micro cap stock I hold, Malvern International (LON:MLVN) , some idiot sold a few thousand pounds-worth of the share, and the resulting fall in share price knocked c.£50k off the value of my shareholding! As you can imagine, I wasn't best pleased, but we have to accept volatility & illiquidity as the price we pay for operating in a very imperfect market. That imperfection is also what creates the upside opportunities. So it means that prices rise fast, when good news comes out. If you operate in the micro cap space, you have to learn to live with volatile prices.

It's important to remember that, with illiquid micro caps, the share price is quite artificial. It can go all over the place, in the short term, on tiny volume. Therefore the chart patterns in small caps mean nothing, and the share price isn't a very good way of valuing the company, in the short term anyway.

Someone reminded me yesterday of a good Buffett quote about wanting to be being greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.

Although as always, we have to be very selective in picking the right stocks. I'm thinking…

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