Sometimes it’s better not to know too much about a person, the same is true about companies. This week has been very domesticated.
Shares
I started to think about the company that did the capital raising last week and I started digging around it. One of the reasons for the raising is to buy a 51% share of a gold mine so I was curious about who their 49% partner was going to be. It turns out there are two publicly listed companies owning the 49%, but they own controlling stakes of each other and have the same people on their boards of management. As for their characters, I’ll just say they don’t sound like the best partners to have.
Another concern is that one of the former directors of the company I have shares in happened to sell a large number of his own personal shares just a few days before the capital raising took place. So he sold his shares for 95c and a few days later could buy them back for 86c. How lucky is that? Lucky enough for it to grab the attention of a national and a local newspaper and now he’s being investigated by ASIC (Australia’s corporate watchdog). It wouldn’t be so bad, but this company has a history of the price ramping up before a positive announcement. That happens with quite a few mining companies, but with this one it’s been excruciatingly obvious. Some people never have enough money, no matter how much they have.
I’d like to sell my shares in that company, but I don’t know what to buy. All the large, dividend paying stocks are fully priced and I don’t know where the money is going to next. I have a feeling about infrastructure, but I haven’t studied that space for a while.
Property
My tenants missed a payment in December. I noticed it missing when I got my bank statement in early January. So I sms’d them a few times, no answer. Finally, two weeks ago, I called on them. They said they didn’t know about it and had only just come back from an overseas trip (they didn’t say why they hadn’t answered my sms messages). Anyhow, I wasn’t aggressive at all, just asked them to check their records and assured them it wasn’t a problem. They paid the money into my account on Thursday, I still haven’t heard directly from them to let me know. Tenants are odd creatures, I think.
The Garden
The heat wave has eased, but it hasn’t rained for months. It’s still mid Summer here, too soon to plant anything much.
Small compost tumblers are useless. I bought two of them six months ago and nothing I put in them has broken down. They’re too small to generate heat and there are holes in the top and bottom which allow all the moisture to drain out. I also think worms can’t survive if the bins are tumbled every day. So I emptied one out yesterday and put what was in it into the real compost heap. I might use those compost bins to store leaves when I have too many of them (I use the leaves for mulch).
Frugal
It’s tomato season now. Our tomato crop failed this year. So I took Mum to the green grocer and asked if they had any big quantities of tomatoes we could have cheap. We bought two boxes of tomatoes for $5 each. So far, Mum’s made 13 jars of pasata, quite a lot of stewed tomato (to go in the freezer), a fair number of tomatoes are drying and we’re planning to make kasundi tomorrow.
Writing
Comparing this month with last, the number of visitors has increased, including the number of first time visitors. Still, not enough for me to brag about. I haven’t done any promotional activities, so I’m thinking about what I should do next. I think I will repost my older articles on an aggregation site. By sharing my articles with other sites, it’s a form of advertising. Depending on the site, I don’t lose copyright and Google doesn’t penalize me for it.
The information I published this week was interesting to me. The one on seeds was my favorite. I’m using this site as something like a notebook for the books I’m writing, so some of the posts are just information from magazines and books. Because of that I’ve started putting an indicator on my posts to show if it’s just an aggregation. If I have time, I’ll go through and mark all my old articles that way too.
Next Week
It’s Chinese New Year, so I don’t expect much in the gold space. I’ll be looking at infrastructure stocks. I’m planning to do another article on the psychology of trading, but that will take a bit of extra work.
Good luck with your speculations!