Back with a...with a... Well, back anyway.

Here again. Out of the blue.

I think I owe a few people an explanation. I have been absent without leave and I'm kinda thinking that I should have posted something a little sooner. Apologies.

I have taken a break from the blog (no kidding!) just to take stock of things. Try and work out in what direction the blog should go. As I mentioned previously, I was acutely worried about the blog becoming a mere description of profit and loss and by doing so, would become boring to read and boring to write. I had realised that a mistake I had made when starting The Portfolio Investor was assuming that there would be an endless series of topics to write about. Of course, there are not.

My other concern was that the blog was becoming a little "preachy", if there is such a word. I didn't and don't want to give the impression that I think that the way I do things is the "correct" way to go about gambling on a serious or semi-serious basis. We all have opinions as to which is the best way to go about doing something. I didn't want to be seen to be trying to impose my ways and methods. Possibly I'm being a little oversensitive here. Actually, I know I'm being a bit of a wet lettuce with regard this. Well, I'm determined if I am to be a lettuce, I shall be an Iceberg, strong and crispy, a true King of the lettuce world. Not a Garden Lettuce with limp, sorry excuse for leaves. Oh no. Iceberg - that's me.

Enough lettuce talk.

I've had a few ideas now. Some I will try my best to bring to fruition, others may fall by the wayside. At the risk of sounding unnecessarily mysterious, I don't want to go into detail at this point. And these things are likely to take months as opposed to days to bring about, so nothing revelatory just yet. In the meantime, I will return to blogging. Not every day, though. I have started to play tennis again at a local club after years of not playing. I'm determined that as I reach my fourtieth year, I shall make an effort to retain some modicum of fitness. This means that often my evenings are full and whereas before I would put myself under real pressure to get the blog done, I'm not going to do that any more. Sometimes there may be only one post a week. At other times I may get up a head of steam and rattle off a few posts over consecutive nights. It really depends on what is happening. I'm not going to force subjects to write about any more, rather wait for something to happen that perhaps merits comment. An example would have been the recent announcement of the SBC taking over the running of Chasemaster. I've had my say on the SBC forum so I imagine most people are aware of my thoughts on the matter, ie. no concerns at all from the Chasemaster perspective but one or two reservations from the SBC angle. Credit to the SBC to allow the posing of some serious questions on there by the way.

I'll also avoid relaying the daily/weekly performance of each individual service. I'll try to give enough detail that readers can pick up on how services are performing and I'll continue to do monthly reviews and break the figures down at that point.

For what it's worth, May finished with a profit that was a smidgeon over £1,200. June is going alright so far with a profit of £700 at an roi of 25% (in other words, it's going far too well for it to last too much longer!). The stars of the month so far have been Northern Monkey (who had a nice winner today, as it happens...Ginger Ted - 8/1 - Thirsk) and On The Nose (which also had a winner today...Power - 5/1 - Ascot).

Right, that's it for now. Good to be back.:)