PICORP, JCY,UNICO and HSL in that order- My basis of clearance.

It can be discomforting clearing off a stock especially one which was doing well at one time but somehow had fallen on hard time and never seem to be able to get up. In fact this stock was recommended to me by someone I know ( that itself should have raised a red flag!) three  and a half years ago.

Had I not been that over hopeful ( read "greedy") I would have made quite a substantial sum on this stock.  I bought it at 40 sen and at its height of value it was 80 sen per share. Just fancy that, I was waiting for it to be 1.00! But it fell precipitously after 2008 financial crisis and with that my relatively large investment. Apparently the company's bad foray into an African country  had  also added to  the slide.

Its dividend last year was 0.41% per share and this year it has gone down to 0.10 %, at first I thought it was 10 sen and was rather momentarily elated till my better half calculated the dividend yield and reminded me that at 25% , the company must have been doing astoundingly well but how come its unit price remains less than 30 sen for almost three years following the financial meltdown? Then it dawned upon me that the dividend is one hundredth of a sen so multiply that (0.001) with my shareholding . Though my dividend amount is still in the thousand bracket but I have had it. I want to find a reason to dispose a large chunk of it and move on with some other stock. So my broker managed to clear off 57.5%  today. I am happy to get rid of the rest pretty soon. I will not go near a penny stock ever again. PICORP is the last of the Mohican!

Next is JCY and I have posted last year on my greatest blunder on this technology stock. Actually I was still reluctant to clear it off as I was thinking the stock would recover following the Eurozone debt recovery perhaps in two years' time but Charles my broker ( not financial advisor mind you) poured cold water on it and told me unless the company diversified, it was a twilight industry.

Anyway initially I had wanted to sell all my Dialog shares because it had gained 29% since my purchase early this year but Charles advised against it. Dialog, in oil and gas sector, had  potential said him. So there goes my JCY today, at least I won't see too many reds in my table of portfolio. I lost substantially on this stock. It wiped up all of my AXIATA gain. I will not touch any technology stock for a long while.

I was mulling over selling some of my plantation stocks. I used to have five of them but have cleared my position in MHC,Kwantas and Swkplnt. As my luck would have it all three rose right after I sold them as if they were waiting for me to get off the bandwagon. For example I sold Kwantas at miserable 1.58 and I bought it high during the plantation craze at 4.70 and following my disposal  it went up to 2.50!

It has been a yo-yo time for me with moments of hope,excitement,up,down,yawn, welcome then to the world of investing. By the way, I have given up on my earlier strategy of buy and hold under this current volatile era.

Now between my THPLNT and UNICO, which one to go? Well the former gives really good dividend and during the financial crisis the company was magnanimous, it gave us bonus issue one to one and I greatly benefited from that gesture. So the choice is clear, UNICO has to go. I kept this stock for a long time hoping that IOI would buy it but the rumour has never materialised. In the meantime their 4% dividend annually has somehow reduced my losses.

I have a recurrent love affair with HSL, the construction stock based in Sarawak. I bought this stock in the middle of 2009 when it was 0.80 sen. I bought quite a lot. It gradually rose and my best selling price was 1.90 late last year. But somehow the price has been idling around 1.70 especially after the Sarawak State election in April 2011. I do not have a good vibe about this stock at the moment. I have made  nearly 113% on HSL so time to say goodbye for now and find another just as exciting. I am keeping MRCB, another construction stock because I have slightly more faith in it.

And what do you know? My clearance sale has netted me the fund for MSM IPO's application beginning with that number 33. I need all the luck as the public portion of this IPO is only 14.06mil (2%).