Posts tagged ‘stock picks’

Sep 15

Week 115: On Purges and Renaissance

Portfolio Performance

See the end of the post for the current make up of my portfolio and the last four weeks of trades.

Recent Developments

I ended the month on a high note, at a new all-time high after gains this week from Gastar, Tronox, and Entrec, and notable gains over the last month from Axia, Novus, Ainsworth, Equal and Monarch Financial.

Gastar’s rise took place after the company announced a major asset purchase in the Hunton I wasn’t as enthused about the purchase as the market because I didn’t see the purchase price, which worked out to a little under $100,000 per flowing boe, as particularly cheap, but I understand that the move further consolidates Gastar’s position in the Hunton, and that the news that the company’s fifth well was producing 160 bopd on 1/3 of the well lateral was another positive datapoint to the field’s potential.

In the case of Tronox, apparently there is some speculation that Huntsman may be about to make a play on the company. This was reported on SeekingAlpha.

I’m not really sure what drove the share price of Entrec on Friday though I think its more of a sector move. The stock had been floating down on low volume for a couple of weeks. It was anything but low volume on the move up on Friday, trading over 1.6 million shares. Read more

Sep 10

4 Comments

Some Cheap Canadian Stocks (PART I)

I’ve been finding bargains harder to come by. Six months ago I was finding it almost too easy to come up stocks that were worthy of consideration. The problem then was more one of pruning. Now it seems like the stocks I find all have a bit of hair.

Rather than venturing further afar to find ideas, I’ve been looking closer to home. I have mostly ignored the Canadian market over the last year and a half. I found a couple of special situations, like Yellow Media and Extendicare, but for the most part the opportunities in the US were more compelling. But that has changed. Over the last couple of months I have been finding and adding more Canadian stocks to my portfolio. I’ve already had some good luck with the endeavour, as both Novus Energy and Ainsworth Lumber received takeover offers in the last few weeks. In the next two posts I am going to talk about some of the names I’ve been adding in my portfolio. In this one I’m going to talk again about Axia, and introduce Vecima Networks.

Axia NetMedia (AXX.to)

Axia is a stock I’ve written about on a couple of occasions (here) and lately I’ve been adding to my position in whenever it has dipped to $1.90. A major overhang has been lifted. When I wrote my last post on Axia, I highlighted the renewal of the Alberta Supernet contract in June of 2015 as my one major area of concern. Axia removed that concern last week when they announced an extension of the contract to 2018. Read more

Jan 6

7 Comments

Week 79: From Chaos to Order

Portfolio Performance

Summary

I am going to try to keep to a shorter update but given my track record with brevity we will see how that pans out. The reason I want to keep it brief is that I am attempting to write a Visual Basic program this weekend that will allow me to paste my transactions into an excel spreadsheet and automatically spit out a list of the closed positions, the open positions, and the relevant transaction parameters. I want a better solution than a snapshot of the RBC Practice Account portfolio holdings page; I have no ability to come up with graphs and charts of performance with my current snipit method, the practice account summary has a bug that screws up the book value and gain/loss numbers every time you make a partial sale of a position, which is a real pain, and I want to be able to post a consolidated list of all my closed positions along with their gain and loss, something that is not possible from the practice account (my current method, which has been to post every one of my updates on my portfolio page, is getting to be a little too long).

On the Cliff

The market was a real yo-yo over the last couple weeks but I didn’t really panic much. I have been known to do violent purges in the midst of chaos, but not this time. I was pretty confident that something would get done, either at the deadline or as a result of the steep fall that would occur after it was passed. As it was, things turned out just about in-line with my expectations. Read more