As most of you probably noticed, I was on vacation last week — a crazy week for those of us in New England or with friends and family in Boston, or, for more prosaic reasons, for anyone who follows the gold markets at all. It was also a bit crazy for me personally, but that was happily because the little Gumshoes needed entertaining on the beach (and I’m still sore as a result).
And partly as a result of the gyrations in the market, my broker did trip a couple of the limit orders in my portfolios — so I’ve got some updates for those of you who are interested in what I’m doing with my own money.
As I did note when I posted the Idea of the Month article just before I left town, I submitted a limit order for the 2018 warrants of Boston Private Financial Holdings (BPFH is the stock, BPFHW the ticker) — and that order did get filled, so I now own some of those warrants. I still think the PNC Financial warrants that I focused on in that article are probably a safer bet over the next five years, but given the activity at the company and the limited premium we’re now paying for those five years I was tempted by this (probably riskier) speculation in a small private banking/wealth management company. They also released their earnings last week — that had no dramatic impact on the shares, but a couple analysts did raise their estimates as a result.
And I also had a limit order triggered for shares in Mongolia Growth Group (YAK in Canada, MNGGF on the pink sheets). I do want some exposure to Mongolia growth, and I like the general idea of this company (leverage the growth in the Mongolian economy by owning and redeveloping downtown real estate and building an insurance business), but it had been too expensive every time I’d looked at them before. So a little while after I sold out of my Mongolian blank check company (Blue Wolf Mongolia, MNGL, which is becoming instead a South American lithium company), I put in a limit order for the top range of valuation that seemed reasonable to me for this speculative company — roughly 2X book value, a market cap of just over $100 million. That was just over $3 a share, and the order ...