What is the riskiest share you have bought?

k8r4u

Loads and loads over the years, some brilliant stars, some rubbish :-)

Reaper

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

Why is Alpha such high yield. Its property trust with revenue from tourism ?

No, no tourism. Commercial tenants and almost all of them A grade (banks, supermarkets etc). My view is the yield is so high because they have been oversold. As soon as people see a paragraph with the words "property" and "Spain" in it they reach for the bargepole without reading any further. Of course even A grade clients can leave in a recession (banks cut branches, supermarkets close stores) and vacant property is the big threat to the business. I'm optimistic though.

Reaper

Damn. I was all ready to buy my next risky share today - ROK, but it rose out of my reach. I kept hoping it would sink back to my buy limit but instead it kept rising - up 15% over the day. *sigh*. He who hesitates is lost.

sabretoothtigger

Still cheaper then they were a week ago. It can be irritating paying too much attention to these as the real moves occur on daily charts


AEX looks the best chart out of shares westy mentioned, Ive heard of them before but dont know the story really. Its scary seeing how much some of these companies have fallen

Latest risky share in my sights is Plexus POS who have come up with a new oil wellhead design. PE of 40 or so but at least they do have an ongoing business as well as prospects. Spread of 10% !

http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/2116/posx.gif

1echidna

Is small oil a good idea if majors squeeze minors out?

Following from the Economist:


Fixing oil wells

The price of staying in the game
Oil companies are now developing a system that could cap deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico in a hurry

Aug 12th 2010
WITH 500 barrels of hard-set cement now gumming up the Macondo well, a number of inquiries are looking back at the loss of the Deepwater Horizon rig and the subsequent spilling of 5m barrels of oil. How much of the fault is found to lie with the well’s design, how much with the way the design was implemented and how much with the way the rig was run will determine how such ventures will be regulated from now on. It will also settle whether BP, the well’s operator, was grossly negligent—a finding that could be worth well over $10 billion in fines and liabilities.
Meanwhile, the oil industry is already getting to grips with the question of what to do if such a thing should happen again. This is in part prudent politics: credible assurances that a future blowout could be better dealt with will be vital to restoring the industry’s fortunes in the Gulf of Mexico. It is also a matter of economic self-interest. The costs facing BP would have been far smaller if it had been possible to shut the well down a lot quicker.
The position taken by ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, which are clubbing together to put $1 billion into creating and equipping a new not-for-profit firm, the Marine Well Containment Company, is that the capability to do much better than at Macondo depends on having hardware designed for the job and available from day one. The companies outlined their plans at a public meeting held in New Orleans on August 4th by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

As the first diagram shows, the main component would be a containment assembly that could fit on top of a damaged blowout preventer, such as the one from which the Macondo oil poured forth. In the absence of a preventer, the assembly could fit on top of various other bits of wellhead equipment, or even on a bare pipe if it was in good enough condition, thanks to a set of adaptors and vice-like grips designed to let it mate with all the different forms of piping known to be in use at deepwater wells in the gulf.
This assembly would have powerful rams that could seal off the flow once it was attached to the relevant bit of broken plumbing. But it would also have outlets that could divert that flow, if need be, into undersea piping. If a well was badly damaged, the pressure that would build up if it were capped might cause it to spring another leak somewhere else. There were worries for some time that something like this would happen at Macondo.
Despite the assembly’s versatility, there might be times when it would have nothing to latch on to—if, say, all the sea-floor kit had toppled over, or if oil was gushing out of a hole in the seabed some distance from the well proper. For cases like this the system will have a range of watertight structures called caissons, which are based on the suction-pile technology used to emplace deep-sea moorings and foundations.

A giant sucking sound
A suction pile is open at one end. That end is put into the sediment into which the pile is to be stuck. The air is then pumped out and water pressure pushes the pile into the ooze, as shown in the second diagram. To make an oil-collecting caisson, such a pile would be used as a collar around a funnel-topped tube that would sit over the leak. Various sizes of caisson will be built, including one 15 metres (50 feet) or so in diameter, large enough to fit over a whole blowout preventer.
Once the caisson was in position, the pile would be pumped out and driven into the ooze. The caisson would fill with oil from the leak. A containment assembly would then be attached to the top of the caisson to send the oil elsewhere. The caisson could not simply be capped, because the oil pressure would blow its suction pile out of the sea floor.
Whether or not a caisson was used, the oil from the containment assembly would then pass through a manifold—a sort of switching yard for pipes—to one or more floating risers leading to the surface and held vertical by buoys. Here, as the third diagram shows, it would be collected by “capture vessels” kitted out with special modules that would flare off dissolved gas and pump the liquid into adjacent tankers. The whole system could cope with a flow of 200,000 barrels a day—more than three times the 63,000 barrels a day the government estimates was the Macondo well’s peak flow rate. The capture vessels could take other jobs around the gulf, but on contracts that allowed them to break off immediately in case of emergency.
Throughout the system there would be ways of warming things up and injecting antifreeze to stave off the formation of icelike methane hydrates. If the capture vessels had to leave in the teeth of a hurricane, there would be a system for injecting dispersants into any oil that spilled out of the risers. That should lessen its impact.
If this equipment had all been available in April, its proponents say it might have capped Macondo in weeks. The companies also say the system should never be needed if wells are properly designed and operated, and that they hope their billion-dollar backstop will never have to be used. The various reports into the Deepwater Horizon disaster will doubtless say the same, while endorsing the newly planned capabilities, or some variant thereof, and making some further drilling conditional on having them in place.
Perhaps it is not too much to hope, though, that some of those reports might shed light on two deeper questions: why did such a technologically astute industry not see fit to develop such useful equipment before it was needed, rather than after? And how might that underlying and disastrous lack of foresight be corrected?

Science and Technology

Biggles

StevieJ wrote: »

I lost money in a tech company in 1997 (well before the bubble burst), share issue, twice oversubscribed, gone bust a short time later, still receiving £1 here and there, until recently.

Yes, I was in Ionica too. At least, now the capital distribution was completed in 08, I can register it as a loss for CGT.

Mind you, like many shares listed here, it was quite a large company and not seen as particularly risky at the time.

Reaper

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

Still cheaper then they were a week ago. It can be irritating paying too much attention to these as the real moves occur on daily charts

The trouble is there is a reason they are cheaper than a week ago - dodgy accounting in one division plus they have moved from profit to loss. Before I felt the market had overdone the drop and the share price was unduely cheap, but I don't think it is any more.

The trouble with risky shares is I try to do a lot more time-consuming research so its a bit frustrating when it means I miss the boat.

Ah well, looking round now for the next candidate.

AEX looks the best chart out of shares westy mentioned, Ive heard of them before but dont know the story really. Its scary seeing how much some of these companies have fallen

I am not so keen on the small oil companies, largely because I don't really know how to evaluate them.

Latest risky share in my sights is Plexus POS who have come up with a new oil wellhead design. PE of 40 or so but at least they do have an ongoing business as well as prospects. Spread of 10% !

I prefer low PEs - those companies which have been overlooked or have fallen out of favour with the market.

Dave101t

ive got some 'real' risky shares for you...cnt at 36p, wti at 5.5p, sea at 86p, to name a few. b ugger springs to mind but its all paper losses only

Reaper

Dave101t wrote: »

ive got some 'real' risky shares for you...cnt at 36p, wti at 5.5p, sea at 86p, to name a few. b ugger springs to mind but its all paper losses only

CNT was disussed earlier in this thread and (to me) the risk outweighs the reward. Down again this morning I see.

SEA is an interesting choice. I might just go away and research that. I take it you bought at the very top of the peak?!

Primrose

I invested in some high technology unit trusts in a PEP a while before before the dot com bubble burst which seemed at the time a nice easy way of increasing my investment. Serves me right for running with the herd and not getting out in a timely way.