On 24/10/2016 14:13, Simon Mason wrote:
On Monday, 24 October 2016 11:38:54 UTC+1, Rod Speed wrote:

Not a high risk if you believe BP is a viable operation and presumably he
does.

Sure, there is SOME risk of BP being involved in something very
stupid like that deep sea drilling rig blowout preventer ****up,
but the risk isnt really all that great.

I sold every BP share I possessed on 22APR10 for £6-22 and made £40000 - a few weeks later they were £2-96.

Made another bomb buying a shedload back at £3-00 and selling them later at £5-00.



But if you had put half into the Fundsmith fund it would be worth 2.5
times now what you paid in 2010. And buying house builders like Barratt
and Taylor Wimpey in August 2011 would have multiplied your money by
5 by 2015. If you had bought shares in Ashtead in August 2011
for just over £1 would have seen a 13 times return by mid 2015.
And dull companies like Avon rubber could have been picked up for
about 40p per share in 2009 but reached £13+ by 2015.

It's a common mistake for people working in a particular sector
to only buy shares in companies that know about, although sometimes
it works in their favour (by luck). Some staff had all their money
in Railtrack shares in 2001. bad move. Ditto Enron.

In 1992 I was a software engineer at a fire alarm co designing and
writing the code for a new analogue addressable fire panel. The
sensors were Apollo 95 series and the data sheet said it was a
member of the Halma group of companies. Halma started out as a
Ceylonese tea plantation but is now a conglomerate of engineering
companies. I bought 2,000 in 2001 and added more and more and reinvested
the dividends. Finally by 2011 Halma was getting 'mentions' in the
financial press as a reliable dividend player with a 30+ year history
of increasing dividends (one of the things to look for). Halma shares
are now £10+. Most of my adhoc purchases were £1.05, 96p and £1.81