A good week for the portfolio last week – a 2% rise. Market conditions seem pretty optimal to me at the moment. The FTSE has benefited from a surge in the oil price over the last month and a fall in the Pound against the Dollar. Quite a few shares on my watchlist seem to be breaking out or about to break out. There seems to be a healthy degree of scepticism in the media at the moment about how much further the market can continue to rise. Hopefully this should mean there is cash on the sidelines to provide the fuel for another leg up over the second half of the year. Continue reading →

This week stock markets continued to rebound globally following the period of volatility earlier this year. Most of the stocks in my portfolio had a good week, though the overall performance was held back by a veiled profit warning from On the Beach, one of my larger positions.   Continue reading →

My portfolio had a fairly decent week last week, breaking out more convincingly to new highs. We are in the middle of results season, with five companies in my portfolio reporting this week: Estee Lauder, Paycom, MasterCard, Moncler and Howden Joinery (new buy). All of these reported earnings and revenues ahead of analyst expectations. However, some of their share prices fell on the news, including fairly substantial falls from Estee Lauder and Paycom, presumably as speculators were hoping for even greater outperformance. Thankfully my portfolio did well in spite of this, or I might have felt rather hard done by… Continue reading →