BP annual report 2015

The British oil giant BP arrived with their fourth quarter which also means that report for the full year 2015. The share price that was already pushed down took yet another nose dive down by around -8% or something around that figure.

Stocks of Interest: February 2016

The shopping period continues and there are many nice companies to pick up at a fair price. Luckily my private safety buffer is already in place and still I got 3k cash that I can do as I please with. I usually try to keep 1k as buffer on the broker account but when the market drops like this, or ideally even more, then I will not sit around and keep that buffer. Additionally my broker have still not increased the trading fee which means that I still find it ok to make only 1k investments.

Last month the two stocks I increased in was K+S and BP. As always the share price kept dropping after I made the investment. Some months that is harder to accept than other months. Right now it is hard. Sometimes my feelings are that come on! Give me a break! Let one of those darn turnarounds actually start to turn. They don't, they just keep slugging out more and more impairment costs. The value that I paid for the company, the value that I thought was there, is in some cases quickly deteriorating. Am I stuck in several value traps? A word that I do not really believe in. Future will tell. Enough with the whining!

Summary of January 2016

January was, stock market wise, an exciting month with a fairly deep general dip in share prices. Interestingly enough much less interesting things have happened with the companies and can be found in their reports in comparison to the reactions on the market.

Share prices goes up and down every day, week, month and year but very rarely does the value of the companies change at the same speed. Never forget this.

German inside trading: January 2016

Woow what I start of the year! Wonderful buy opportunities have appeared in more or less every part of the world. Great! I went to the site to check the activity of the managers and I was astonished over how little activity there had been. Maybe they also had an expensive Christmas / New Year party and decided to tighten the belt a little or due to the massive reporting season coming up with Q4, full year and Q1 many of them are maybe not even allowed to trade. Either way it was very low activity!

For the previous report please click on German inside trading: December 2015.

The few things happening can be summarized as:

The middle manager conundrum

Since around half a year or so I have been writing that I am looking for a, to put it nicely, new challenge in my life. To be more frank I am bored out of my mind and I need a new job to kick start my brain cells again.

I have by now been running my own company for over seven years and I have had between three to seven employees during these years. For a small company that makes you the CEO but for a large one that makes you a middle manager. Times have sometimes been tough with decreased employees and decreased salary but that is how things can be.

Due to my studies in Business Administration and the essay that we had to write in the end I have come to realise what a fatal mistake I have made in my career. The essay lifted my eyes over the plate but I had already before started to suspect that something was not correct.