Minutes of the August meeting held 5th August in Phil’s back garden.

(For those of you who weren't able to attend, my faith in the British summer was proved well founded (even though we were fearful of a real downpour at the start of the afternoon) we were blessed with a good afternoon's weather, and to the best of my knowledge I didn't manage to give anybody food poisoning – Phil)

Present:

Julian Kern

Terry Emmony

Phil Jones

Roy Brown

Andrew Smillie

Julie Grundy

Apologies:

Debbie McDonnell, Steve Spence, Peter Sweeney, Cynthia Brooke, Ann Nurse, Mike Arkless,

Di Lane, Rod Wood, Ron Pierce, Paul Holden

1) Roy read from an article in that week's Daily Telegraph about the fortunes of another Share Club who had, amongst other things, split their portfolio into "wheat" (FTSE 100 companies held for the long term) and "chaff" (less reliable stocks on which they set a stop loss price, at which they would sell to avoid further loss. Their stockbroker, Barclays, appears to have a slightly different commission structure which only charges once for combined share dealings at the same time.

2) Terry has posted the monthly position on the ExEC website for you all to view.

The overall position at the end of July was down a little on the position at the end of June, to 94.3p per unit to just under parity, with 13 of the 18 comanies losing during the month; most notably Advance Visual Comms (£225) and Computacenter (£207), and the only gains in double figures (of pounds) being on EMAP (£14) Carlton (£29) Wiggins (£36) and Lattice (£39).

It is the second month in a row that we have underperformed the FTSE index, where we have almost always beaten that index.

3) We reviewed the recent performance of various companies, decided not to sell any at the moment, but we have set a target price for Macdonald Hotels of 180p (to hold onto a gain before it drifted away) and 220p to captalise on greater gains.

We also so set a sell target for Computacenter of £420. We discussed the idea of setting a stop loss policy and price for our shares, and eventually settled on setting a stop loss price of 80% of the purchase price of any new investments (On HSBC this means 677.6p - see later)

3) With £900 available to invest, we talked about the sectors that each attendee of the July meeting had agreed to follow and recommend.

Roy analysed Banks, all are expensive, but HSBC was just above its low for the previous 52 weeks.

Peter looked at Hotels and Leisure, and by email reported that nothing was worth considering.

Julian watched the Transport sector and recommended Stagecoach (a recommendation of his from earlier months) and Hays , currently close to its low point for the year, and having appointed a new MD.

Andrew reported on the food sector, saying that all the top 5 companies were quite near their high points over the last 52 weeks. His recommendation was Associated British Food costing 457p and with analysts split 50/50 between buy and hold recommendations. 

Terry studied Support Services and recommended Ashted Group plc , a plant and machinery business which would yield £25 of dividends in 3 weeks apart from anything else.

I reported on Construction, and recommended Carillion, formerly part of Tarmac, which had generally been supported by analysts.

After a vote we decided on investing all £900 in HSBC.

With no meeting in September, we will have another £800/900 to invest when we meet again in October.

We agreed to watch these recommendations for potential investment in October.

4) We have heard from Ron Pierce, who suggested we could meet around the Leeds area in October.

A number of members were keen to attend a meeting there, and I have asked Ron to look into arranging a venue.

The date for the meeting has still to be determined but October 14th has been suggested.

Hope to see you in October, depending on responses.

Regards,

Phil