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Zak Mir - Rekindling a passion for DIY and why Hurricane Energy may still have plenty of fuel in the tank

Published: 08:49 16 Apr 2017 BST

oil worker directing a giant drill into a hole

This is the age of DIY. Not only in terms of spending an afternoon at B&Q, but also in many aspects of our lives. Pre-internet we needed the travel agents, experts, researchers and even agony aunts.

However, now you can just Google almost anything to get information or an answer that will tell you where to get information. The result of this is that in many sectors prices have gone down, with perhaps the no frills airlines being one of the most obvious examples.

For someone like myself focused on the financial markets, the transformation over the past few decades has been incredible. In the late 1980s I remember having a TOPIC screen installed at home and from memory this cost £1,200 a month. Now the same data live from the London Stock Exchange is a tiny fraction of this.

Plummeting costs

The cost of trading shares has also plummeted, although it still hard to find an impoverished stockbroker! So the internet has been massively deflationary, the question is whether there have been other benefits than cost?

This week I interviewed the founder and CEO of a small, boutique stockbroker, the type many of us might class as “old school” in terms of the role it plays and services it provides.

What was interesting here as far as the way it operates in the now stringent FCA environment is how much due diligence is carried out, not only in terms of companies it acts for, but also making sure its clients understand the risks in the world of small caps, and are suitable for this particular endeavour.

I was struck in particular though, by the way that for each company that the stockbroker highlighted, there was a specific USP, angle or advantage to its business model. All of this backed the idea of being in a stock only for compelling reasons.

The unloved

It would seem that many investors tend to have a portfolio of either wishy washy stocks, or the unloved orphans which they bought too high. There is also the phenomenon of where there has been a material negative change in the fundamentals, but where they soldier on, not wishing to crystallise a loss.

The stocks which I have picked out this week which seem to merit investigation are certainly some of the favourites of the moment among private investors.

For instance, Hurricane Energy (LON:HUR) is backed by its mega North Sea assets and hopes of early production on the fundamental front.

On the technicals this week I was impressed how the latest chart gap to the upside (of many) has held. The expectation is that a break of this week's 62p intraday high could lead to an acceleration towards 80p over the next one to two months.

Jubilee celebration 

With Jubilee Platinum (LON:JLP) the excitement this week was cutting losses and boosting its tailing operations, while in terms of the price action we have seen good support come in above the 50 day moving average at 4.8p.

This suggests the pullback from the early March spike in the stock through 7p is complete, and we could see a retest of this zone over the next month. A quick break of recent 5.75p resistance will be chased by the bulls.

Finally, after nearly a year on the back foot, mining sector investor Metal Tiger (LON:MTR) looks to be regrouping off the back of a possible resource upgrade in Botswana. It is encouraging that the stock has pushed back above its 200-day moving average at 2.64p, and looks to be heading as high as 4.5p over the next one-to-two months while the 200-day line holds.

Zak Mir, Presenter TipTV, Associate NEX Exchange, Columnist Yahoo! Finance UK

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