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Black Sea Truth Better Than Fiction March 7, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , add a comment

Atlantis, by David Gibbons

Black Sea, by Neal Ascherson

In the last ice age, sea level was much lower than it is now with water bound up in the great ice-sheets that covered Northern Europe. When the ice melted, the sea rose rapidly, and massive flooding engulfed coastal plains everywhere. Until about 7400 years ago, the Black Sea was cut off from the Mediterranean, a giant freshwater lake fed by rivers such as the Danube and Dneiper. When the water rose, it cascaded over the Bosphorus flooding the Black Sea in a matter of months. If there were people living in the area, it would have been traumatic rather than catastrophic. Although their homes would have been inundated, they themselves should have escaped with whatever they could carry. It is possible that they carried stories of a great flood, later to be recorded in the book of Genesis.

David Gibbons, a marine archaeologist himself, takes this fairly well-established idea and builds it into a marine archaeologist’s fantasy of equipment, well-financed research, and derring-do as the intrepid team of scientists set out to find Atlantis in the Black Sea and, en route, find themselves embroiled in international terrorism and post-Soviet organised crime.

The science and technical details are convincing, but the characters are wooden and spend far to much time explaining things to each other. The climatic parts of the book, when our hero is single handedly driving a submersible despite a serious wound and utter exhaustion to save the world from impending doom, drag on and on and on.

To prove that truth is indeed stranger, and certainly more interesting than, fiction, Neal Ascherson’s Black Sea is a gripping yarn about the life, civilisation and geography of the Black Sea. Despite being 10 years old now, and so not including many of the recent archaeological discoveries, this book gives a thoughtful insight into a region of the world which is not well understood in Western Europe but which has heavily influenced it.

Smelly shares - Composting and Waste March 5, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment, Investing , add a comment

I’ve got one more unit of shares to buy before the taxman’s contribution to my SIPP arrives, and I thought I’d look at TEG Environmental, a company specialising in composting, which has started to get a few reasonable contracts for its Silo-Cage composting system. Investors Chronicle have good things to say, there is a reasonable level of liquidity and they are starting to bring in some cash. However, their shares have rocketed from 70p to 85p in the last few weeks, possibly due to news about a new partnership with Glendale Parks Management, which will help them get more business with local authorities, and possibly because of the publicity they’ve had in the press. I’m going to watch this for a few weeks and see how it goes.

While looking at TEG, I stumbled upon Straight, who manufacture all sorts of useful plastic things for recycling and composting. They’re involved in some inovative schemes including kerbside collection of kitchen waste for composting. They also have decent liquidity, profits, improving cashflow and cash at hand. They even pay a small dividend. I’ve put in limit order for this for tomorrow morning.

Researching Shares

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Investing , 2 comments

These investment blogs are more my notes than anything else. It’s a diary of my sharedealing experience.

I had better point out that I’m a real newbie to all this with little more than some basic management accounting training behind me. If you’re daft enough to take anything I say here as advice without doing your own research and employing your own powers of critical thinking, you deserve to lose your money.

At the moment, I’m looking at Aim shares with a strong green focus - renewable energy, waste disposal, pollution prevention or control - as well as tech stocks, particularly interesting newish comms companies. Many of these are hard to evaluate in the way the books suggest, because they’re small, new and not necessarily in profit. When I’m researching a possible investment, this is what I do:

  1. Get and read the annual report (from the company’s website, or through one of the free report services)
  2. Look for some of the fundamental financial points mentioned in Peter Temple’s book. I’m particularly keen on some positive cashflow, even for companies that are still in loss-making stage. Burn rates are interesting too. Fundamental ratios like P/E don’t mean much if the company isn’t in profit yet, but if it is, its worth seeing.
  3. Try to identify some sort of unique advantage of the company over it’s competitors, thinking of competition in the wider sense, not just others in the sector. Are they in the rail business or the business of transporting people and freight.
  4. Review other shares in the same sector (the Aim list is good for this for Aim shares)
  5. Look at the share’s green credentials. I am particularly interested in companies that are doing something positive to create alternative sources of energy, reduce pollution, carbon emissions etc, rather than ones which are just ‘not bad’. That’s why I’m not investing in the so-called ‘ethical funds’.
  6. See what the Investor’s Chronicle has to say. You need to be a suscriber to get at all of the content, which costs about £33 per quarter, and gives the paper magazine as well.
  7. Check for liquidity. Most of my single stock investing is likely to be on the Aim market, and some of those shares have very low daily average volumes. I invest in £1000 units, and want to see an average of at least £10k per day. This info is shown on my broker’s site.
  8. See what’s happening now, by checking the discussion boards on III, and the recent news, from the broker’s site. I might also do a quick google, just in case.
  9. Check the charts. Nothing fancy here but it’s worth seeing if there is evidence of a share topping out, or any cyclic behaviour.
  10. Cross my fingers, offer up a prayer to the gods of chance, and buy
  11. Set a stop limit order at (price - 20%), because I don’t trust those gods of chance very much.

Capitalism and Renewables March 4, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment, Investing , add a comment

I’ve spent most of this afternoon trying to work out how to invest my pension contribution for 2006, and have managed to sort out about 2/3 of it.
I am fairly happy with a reasonable level of risk, but I’m aware that the market has been bullish for a while now, and there are some indications that it may slow down a little this year.  Certainly, this week’s issue of Investor’s Chronical was rather bearish, with comments on the way cash was flowing into managed funds and ordinary investors (like me) were coming back into the market in a way that they hadn’t since the dot.com bomb.

I intend to invest about half this year’s contribution in green small stocks, and the rest in more diversified funds to keep some balance.  Most of my assets are very conservative and long term (London flat, a few hectares of farm forestry and a share of a house in New Zealand which I doubt I’ll sell in the next twenty years), so a little riskiness for improved return is probably a good idea.
For the diversified funds, I’ve chosen Fidelity’s Special Situations Fund, which is one of the few to consistently outperform the relevant index (FTSE250) through both good times and bad.  I am astounded at the number of these funds that do no better than, or indeed even worse than, the index.  I went to an IFA a couple of months ago, thinking he could help me pick something better than I would myself, but he presented me with three funds, none of which outperformed their relevant index, and then had the cheek to tell me that if I bought funds independently, the fees would be higher.  Obviously, the poor chap had never heard of a fund supermarket and through my broker, Squaregain, all the fund fees were cheaper than his quote as well.

This is the biggest fund in the UK, and has been doing well for years.  It’s fund manager is close to retirement though, which does present a risk, and the fund will be split at the end of this year.  I’m fairly confident he will have trained his successors well though, and I like the very open way Fidelity are managing this transition.

I had a happy time looking at various renewable energy shares on the AIM market.  I was looking for something that was fairly diversified across the different renewable sectors, because I think wind may run into trouble with planning permission and reliability issues, and also because all these technologies are so new that its hard to see which will prove to be winners.  I wanted something that seemed to have a strong management team, a fair bit of liquidity and at least some postive cashflow.  I’m not expecting dividends - these companies ought to be reinvesting any profits.

Two companies have caught my eye - Renewable Energy Holdings, and Novera Energy. I also considered Clipper Windpower, but they are only in wind, and it’s difficult to find much solid information on them.  Both the companies I’ve chosen have a range of technologies, wind, wave, biomass.   Novera Energy is a little larger and actually made a profit last year, while REH has just started to see some money come in from wind farms in Germany.  They both seem to have a nice balance of engineers and accountants on their boards, and good general energy sector expertise.  I’ve put bids in for them for Monday morning, so my SIPP portfolio will be on its way very soon.
Next week, I’m going to look for one more stock, possibly TEG Environmental, which was tipped by the Investors Chronicle a couple of weeks ago, or something similar.  I need something out of the energy sector, because I’m getting rather over-exposed there, as I also have an ISA holding in BG Group.

Electrify transport and solve the storage problem March 2, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment, Green in the City , add a comment

There’s a problem with wind power, in that it is available when the wind is blowing within the appropriate range for the turbine. That means that wind power can’t be relied upon to provide the base load that the national grid requires, and also that extra load has to sometimes be suddenly shed to prevent power surges. Apparently (and I can’t find the reference) one of the reasons Denmark is so successful in it’s use of wind power is that it can shed excess capacity to neighbouring countries fairly easily. For wind to work well, you need some way of storing or shedding that excess electricity

Reading this post over on Highly Allochthonous about decentralising power supply, a thought occured to me. If only 35% of the UK’s energy usage is electricity then why not increase that by electrifying road transport - cars and buses - and park them on charging units which only charge when there’s capacity available. If, say, 30 million vehicles were electrified, that’s an awful lot of battery storage.

Perhaps you could even use the batteries in your electric car to feed power back into the house at times when the grid or your microCHP wasn’t able to provide enough electricity.

Now there’s a thought for the government’s energy policy makers.

Kiwis Everywhere

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging, New Zealand , add a comment

I should have called this blog Camden Kiwi. That would nicely capture two parts of my life - I’m from New Zealand, but have lived in London for the last 7 years. I’m starting to think there’s a little synchronicity going on here though. I know there are at least three Kiwis reading this - my mother (), William Parry who commented on my last post, and a bloke from somewhere on the East Coast who emailed me and told me he was taking an RSS feed. It’s great to see you all!

The biggest NZ connection happened yesterday. I had an email from an American lady who’s writing a book about blogging - won’t say who in case it’s confidential - who would like to use this blog as an example. I was rather flattered, and noticed that she’d cced her co-author, who had a .co.nz address. I then had a look at the NZers web site, wrote to my mother, and found out that the co-author is not only a friend of my mother, but was also meeting her in a couple of hours. The blogosphere is a very small place indeed!

So, if you’re a Kiwi reading this, introduce yourself in the comments and send me a link to your blog. I’d love to hear from you. (and if you’re not a Kiwi, say hello anyway)
And the book’s due out in April, so I’ll review it then. It’s going to be fabulous.

Water going down the drain March 1, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment, London , add a comment

My annual water bill is about £220. That is nearly as much as my electricity and gas combined. The difference is that while I try quite hard to conserve all three, my gas and electricity is metered but my water is not.

In Dover and Kent, the water company has just got permission to make water meters compulsory because of the the drought, which means that the water wasters will finally have to pay a fair charge for their profligacy. Nice socialist ideas of sharing these costs are, like the Camden Council Heating Pool, great in theory, but give no incentive to save a scarce resource.

If people need help, then surely it’s better to increase their benefits or working family tax credit, rather than subsidising their water and gas usage. That way, if they want to save water or gas and spend the money elsewhere, they can. Sometimes a capitalist approach to conservation is the easier one.

It also means that the water companies have a stronger incentive to do something about leaky pipes, as they can’t sell water they don’t deliver to a customer. In my area there are two places where the pipes seem to burst every 6 months or so suggesting that a more long term fix is needed

The last time I looked at it, getting a meter in a multi-flat building looked all too hard, but I’m going to try again. I am tired of subsidising people who can’t see that water is valuable.