End of May update.

So here we are at the end of May already and somewhat depressingly closing in on the longest day so soon already. Well at least summer has finally arrived in the UK and markets seemed to have had a spring in their step too this month. This mostly seemed to be on the back of an easing in tensions on the Korean Peninsular, some kind of agreement between the US and China on tariffs and continued economic growth. Consequently all the main UK indices saw positive total returns this month with the Fledgling & Mid 250 indices leading the way with total returns of 3.7% & 3.1% respectively. FTSE 100 & the broader All Share both delivered 2.8%, while somewhat surprisingly the Small Cap index brought up the rear with just a 1.5% total return, but this is probably explained by several individual fallers this month with Photo-Me (PHTM) and On The Beach (OTB) being a couple of notable examples.

This brings me onto update you on the UK Market Monthly timing indicators, which at least one person has been kind enough to say they find useful! After the brief sell signal back in February / March as markets corrected these continued to recover further into positive territory again this month given the returns discussed above. Thus the additional focus on combining these with economic indicators has proved it worth again and kept me in the market as it has returned to its recent highs. Not sure how some of those people who were raising serious levels of cash during the weakness have done, who knows maybe they put it all back in at the lows, or perhaps they are now sweating about putting it back to work in addition to sweating due to the hot weather?

Any way talking of sweat or lack of it the laid back CIS Portfolio had a good month and recouped most of the relative losses it suffered in April as it outperformed by 2% with a 4.8% return versus the 2.8% for the All Share discussed earlier. The top and bottom risers and fallers are shown below:

Top 5

Ticker Name                                      % Price Chg 1m
BMY Bloomsbury Publishing                          31.6
GAW Games Workshop                                     17.2
APH Alliance Pharma                                         10.6
BOY Bodycote                                                        9.94
IAG International Consolidated Airlines       8.66

Bottom 5

Ticker Name                                         % Price Chg 1m
BWY Bellway                                                         -0.93
XPP XP Power                                                       -2.29
AMO Amino Technologies                               -3.52
FXPO Ferrexpo                                                    -8.97
TAP Taptica International                              -13.3

As with the timing indicators I've only had one other person kind enough to say they find the portfolio stuff useful & general lack of interest on Twitter so I'll not go into detail on post event rationalisation here or post this on there.

I guess if I can find the time I should write up commentary on news flow and results as they come in, but I've been busy and away quite a bit recently, but again I get the impression that people aren't that interested in that sort of stuff either and it is not a great use of my time when I have other things to be getting on with. Talking of which I'm off now to do the monthly re-screening of the portfolio and I'll try and put the results of that on the site next week - so if that is of any interest then do check back here next week.