My investment experiences
Calculating real losses
Here’s a way to think about the sale of a losing share. It applies to shares from which you receive dividends and it incorporates the income you’ve received into the overall assessment. It helps you to keep on track in controlling losses, and reduces the mental pain!
I bought Pfizer shares a couple of years ago in May 2024. The shares haven’t done well. The loss on my £5000-worth of Pfizer shares over 24 months was roughly £1000 (20% of my capital) but my income from dividends during the same period was £426 (about 8.5%). Looking at the overall picture, my loss was 12% which brings it back into the realms of an acceptable loss. I went ahead and sold.
Controlling losses is one of the most important things in managing investments because allowing them to spin out of control makes a situation from which it’s extremely difficult to recover. For example, a 20% loss requires a 25% gain in the share price to recover; a 33% loss requires 50% gain. Getting one’s original stake back rapidly becomes impossible. I try to stop losses as close to 15% as possible but that’s hard to achieve.
17 July 2026
How I wasted time researching a super green technology share
The Investors Chronicle (with which I have no commercial relationship) has articles called ‘Reads you may have missed’. I got really excited reading about a company called Sulnox that sells a new organic chemical which, when mixed into fuel, helps ships use energy more efficiently and reduces carbon emissions.
Sulnox’s product met EU regulations and was gaining orders. It would be good for the environment, save ships carbon fees, and the size of the market would be huge. The product was patented in 70 countries. All in all, I thought this could be a winner – even an outstanding winner although possibly in the ‘high risk, high reward’ category and that could also mean high losses.
The company is listed on the Aquis exchange. This exchange was a new one to me – it’s for growth companies – so more speculative than the AIM market. The spread between the buy and sell price when I first looked was incredibly high. It has since reduced to 10% – depending on when you look at it. Not good.
One thing that had particularly impressed me was that, according to the article, ‘last week Sulnox announced a global distribution agreement with Drew Marine – a major supplier of performance chemicals….’ So I looked at the price charts expecting a major jump in the previous week. There was no such jump.
That’s how it all unravelled because what I hadn’t noticed was the article was dated 3rd December 2025 (over 5 months ago). I had assumed if the Investors Chronicle was sending it out now, it was pretty recent. In fact, it looks as though most readers thought likewise because the share price went up 8% the first day of trading after the article was published (or I should say ‘re-published’).
The moral is obvious – check the date of anything you read!
26 May 2026