Investing - reading the boards

Today is a day for trawling through news, looking at risers and fallers, and reading the boards (the forums) at places like iii, in the hope of throwing up new leads. The latter activity is proving rather depressing: so many boards where a long, gentle decline in the share price is accompanied by posts saying things like "holding for the moment - surely this can't go on!", followed by a single, agonised post saying "What just happened?", as the unfortunate investors are relieved of 99% of their invested capital on one unforgiving day.

So I'm going to think a little longer about Blinkx. Even if the results are going to be as good as expected, the recent, rumour-driven rise in the share price (supposedly google are looking at them, ho-hum) has probably taken most of the value out of that already. And long term, the share price does seem to still be on its declining trajectory.

The same with AZ Electronic Materials. Yes, the recent drop was probably overdone, but the smart money picked it up on Tuesday at about 240p. That said, their conference call was very reassuring: the slowdown in colloidal silicon sales was caused mostly by two of their customers learning how to squirt less of the stuff over their chip wafers while polishing them, and less by competition, and those two customers were only coming down from using *more* than everybody else, so that practice is not going to spread; opto-electronics was good, and they have firm promises of restocking from their customers in the IC business in the second half. That sounds like a potential purchase, but I might wait a few days and think about it a bit more.

Meanwhile, the Real Portfolio is powering ahead. Genel (which I bought on March 5th as a place-holder while I was waiting for GKP to stop falling and clear up its court case) has had a stream of good news since then and has risen 14%. Cairn is up nicely, even Imagination is up again after its recent decline. Finally, Wolfson, the perpetual puppy that I fall for time and again, only to be disappointed, has at last come good in a big way by being appointed a primary partner for Samsung, supplying audio hubs to their Galaxy range. That's good not just for the business itself, which has led to a nice 8% bounce in the share price, but because it will doubtless encourage other phone and tablet manufacturers to look at using them — Samsung being very much the firm to copy nowadays.