Fund manager John Aldersley leads in the first of our four week $100,000 shares race.
Joining professional tipster Richard Hemming they’re the only competitors in the black, despite the overall market rising.
The ignominy of the two BusinessDay racers being at the bottom is alleviated ever so slightly by the fact that one of them picked the best stock, Metallica Minerals.
OK, it was me but I also picked the worst, mining drill supplier Boart Longyear which is in the throes of looking at “refinancing and recapitalisation” options that the market clearly doesn’t like the sound of. Neither do I.
Unfortunately the first, and indeed only, rule of our race is that none of the 10 stocks each competitor originally chooses can be changed.
Second best performer is Poseidon Nickel chosen by last round’s winner, Richard Pritchard.
The one cent wonder Caeneus Minerals on which he swept to victory is the second worst stock. Hmm, this is a race of symmetries.
Anyway the Aldersley portfolio, which includes the third and fourth best performers in Austock and Northern Star, is noteworthy for the fewest stocks going backwards. I find that helps in this game.
The insurance bond issuer Austock, incidentally, is one of 30 pooled development funds which pay a lower company tax rate. Even better, their shares are exempt from capital gains tax.
These funds date back to the nineties and were designed to provide capital for small businesses. The program was shut down in 2007 but the funds have kept their tax breaks.
This week will test the market with a speech on Tuesday by the Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens and the consumer price index on Wednesday, not to mention Wall Street’s reaction to daily data on the United States economy including home sales and manufacturing.
