Life goes on after my retirement 10 months ago.

While the poor performance of our portfolios, up till Jan this year has been abysmal, in February, suddenly it took a turn up.  Severe depletion of our superannuation which is based on the ASX stocks mostly, would have been disappointing.

I have done a lot of research to buy the stocks we own, yet a significant number of them are bad performers.  Fortunately, these are balanced by outperformers.

Down market

 It is going to be depressing... but where is the trough?  That is a question no sensible human being can answer

 I don't know but I know the market will lead into boom or recession.  That means at the height of a recession, the market has already gone up!

To retire or not?

I am not in the ASX for altruistic reasons... but I like to buy or sell legally and fairly in the open.  Time and effort are needed to monitor and decisions have to be made; these processes need to be profitable.  I am not greedy wanting more money... but I enjoy the thrill of an intellectual challenge against the fund managers (mostly) and other investors.  When I collect alpha, it is very satisfying mentally and great for wealth but I am not necessarily happier nor miserable if there are falls.  Nicer to make money practising my profession because I feel useful to the society but stock investment is easier, pays more and less stressful.  Still accountable (to wife) but much less accountable than in medicine.

When you get appreciative customers and you make a profit, you are satisfied because you deserve it.  But when you try

hard to appease the uncommon ungrateful customers who you have served well, it is very frustrating... even if they have

paid.  Imagine if they have made a complaint to the Office of Fair Trading, even if you are in the right, it eats up your time
and it also causes unwarranted stress.  I have to pay a lot of money for medical indemnity... to protect myself from these

rare people.  I pay NO insurance for my investment strategies and earn more now!

STM

 2 months ago, from a source that I can't recall, I was informed of a porphyry system discovered in Ecuador.  After I made my beachhead investment, it fell.  And I bought another 6 times, and they all kept falling!

I began to doubt my understanding of STM's announcements  But suddenly, I was right!  And today, I am up 121%.  It has been jumping up for a few days now due to lab confirmation of its first drilling sample.

RHY

I handle a lot of patients in the Endoscopy unit.  From my point of view, a blood test that looks for bowel cancer antigen with higher sensitivity and specificity than both the faecal occult blood test and also colonoscopy must be THE screening test of the future.

However even after proving its worth, the share price kept falling until the low 80c in recent months.  I kept faith and that gave me many opportunities to top up.

Today for the first time in months, I have gone into paper profit.  Those frequent cheap buys allowed me to average down my buy price.

RHY illustrates my philosophy in investment that if a stock produces good updates and investors continue to sell, that is the stock to top up.

SLX

 Many years ago, uranium was a hot sector.  Any stock that purported to have uranium in its tenement would surely rise.  But only one actually materialized its discovery, i.e. PDN.  Even then it had problem when the price of uranium fell.  It was postulated that when sale of uranium from decommissioned missile nuclear heads was complete, the demand for mined uranium will rise.  It never happened and those proponents of that market theory went into hiding.  And after the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear energy industry went dead.

But the need to decarbonize the Earth creates a nuclear energy comeback.   I didn't want uranium stocks so I went back to SLX again which I had sold at a loss.

SLX has the world's only 4th generation technology for uranium enrichment using laser.  Hitachi and GE didn't want it anymore and made little progress after Fukushima.  After taking that joint venture back and the price of uranium climbed, so did SLX and I am now nicely in the black after a cliff climb in its share price.

Alan Bond and Kerry Packer, AXE and VUL

 Alan Bond bought Channel Nine from Kerry Packer at a very high price and then forced to sell later at a very low price back to Kerry.  And so his famous quote...

"You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I've had mine".

I am experiencing a different Alan Bond moment and I don't think I will ever get another TWO.  AXE is up 16x and VUL is up 40x. Most of the rise was over 20 months although I have owned the former for 10 years.  It is very surreal.  My fear is... will it be sustained?