So what's been happening since January?

State of Play: Started the blog over Christmas 2008, created a set of selection criteria to find companies worthy of full analysis, applied the criteria and came up with a list of 5 companies. Then everything came to a grinding halt.

So what's happened - bugger all! Actually, back in January I looked at the list of the five companies, being:
• Macquarie Office Trust (MOF)
• Mount Gibson Iron (MGX)
• Nomad Building Solutions (NOD)
• Macquarie Country Wide (MCW) and
• Charter Hall Group (CHC)
and thought, mining and property - you've got to be joking, as if they are going to go anywhere! To motivate myself I tried to view it all as a learning exercise, but at the end of the day, I lost interest because I was thinking its all a waste of time.

A couple of days after coming up with the list, however, I did note down the prices of each share:
MOF - 19.5 cents per share ('cps')
MGX - 38 cps
NOD - 17.5 cps
MCW - 23.5 cps
CHC - 23.5 cps
That was during the day on the 30 January 2009.

Lets compare these prices with the closing prices on 7 August 2009:
MOF - 23.5 cps, an increase of 4 cps or 21%
MGX - $1.16 ps, an increase of 78 cps or 205% !!!
NOD - 64 cps, an increase of 46.5 cps or 266% !!!!
MCW - 50 cps, an increase of 26.5 cps or 113%
CHC - 47 cps, an increase of 23.5 cps or 100%

If I had spent an equal amount of each share back on 30 January 2008, the portfolio value would have gone up 241%. Even taking brokerage into account only reduces that gain to 231%. Meanwhile, the All Ordinaries Index has increased 27%. Needless to say, I am kicking myself hard and fast and am now caught in the dilemma of deciding whether to just jump in or whether to do the proper analysis before jumping in.

Meanwhile, I don't really have a broker. I have an account with Commsec which I haven't used since about 2004, so I'm not even sure its still valid and given there are now stacks of online brokers, I'm not sure that they are worth going through anymore. So I think that will be my next post - online brokers.