h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You hoped people would not notice your provates? Why what were they doing?

Saturday, 10th September - 2pm

Quite...

Now returning to business.

The Alpha account got capped last night at £13m. That is a rather disappointing figure, but I guess trading conditions in the early part of the week were tough, and I was guilty of a certain amount of over-trading.

The effect of this over-trading is evident in the two accounts playing for the TT position, Beta and Delta, which are in 300th and 90th places respectvely.

As for the Gamma account. Blimey! That one was close. I decided last night to give it a flying start for this morning. What I did was downtrade it to 3.5% below the £2m mark and then invest in Mary Pierce and let her price rise over night. This morning I discovered that she got within half a percent of £2m and getting capped early. Whoops! That would have been embarrassing.

Overall though, the flying start has worked, as the account is currently worth £2.35m which is a 17% increase for the day without me doing anything

Monday, 12th September - 9:15am

Investing in Justin Gatlin after the tennis win bonus yesterday afternoon was not the brightest thing that I've ever done...

10 hours later:

And it goes from bad to worse...

Mistake Number One - When you get your pay out for the tennis WB, don't stick it all straight back into Mary Pierce.

Mistake Number Two - When, an hour after making Mistake Number One, you recognise it and decide to react. Make sure you stick your money in the right cricketer. (A hint: his name ain't Shane)

Mistake Number Three - Not noticing that you made Mistake Number Two until five hours after you've made it.

The upshot of the whole day? I've made bugger all money, with what meagre gains that I have made being eaten up with commission charges.

I think I'm going to leave the whole lot in Pietersen for two days for divis and have a break from the game. This week is complete write off already, and we'll start again from Thursday...

Ah the highs and lows!

Where else would you call £13mil not a lot of money?

**spits large quantity of Lucozade onto the screen as he sees how much money Kevin Pietersen has earned him today**

B

Is it a lot then?

Well he's more or less doubled what I had last night. And, like Desky, I expect a stonking dividend payout on Thursday morning.

B

So thats more of a % increased than he scored in runs then

Tuesday, 13th September - 11:15pm

Yes, Kevin has gone up quite nicely today. I bought in at £4.56 yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to see him stay at the top of the tree.

A lot of the big hitters have gone with Pietersen, despite all the follies of buying an expensive share for dividend purposes. His price at midnight on Monday was £5.13 and his price now is £6.76. The rise has stopped these last few hours, and I expect his share value to start dropping slowly through Wednesday. I don't believe that it will drop very much, as there will be few people getting out of the share until the dividends are paid.

However as soon as midnight is passed and folk start selling, I expect his price to dive. So Master B, I think Thursday morning before you set off for work might be a good time to fire up your PC and get trading.

I'll be interested to see what the size of the dividend will be - £4 max is my guess. I don't expect him to be the top paying dividend. Nor do I expect him to have the highest yield on dividend alone. However combining the expected dividend with today's day trade activity should put him at the top of the tree as the best overall performer for the divi period.

Does he get extra for having such stupid hair?

Wednesday, 14th September - 11pm

No he's getting less and less, pricewise that is

I did expect KP to go down in value today, but I wasn't expecting the crash that happened. He went from £6.76 to £6.22 in the course of the day. The price stabilised a bit in the early evening and has only gone down a further 2p.

It will be interesting to see what his overnight performance is going to be like, once all the heavyweights sell up at 12:40am when the market reopens after the dividends have been paid

Then of course there will be another crash in his price when all the 9to5ers turn on their office PCs tomorrow morning and get selling.

I think I'm going to lose out either way.

B

How so?

I can't stay up until 12.40, and if I try I won't be able to log on before going to work.

B

Just as long as you sell as soon as you can. To be honest I doubt whether there will be a significant drop until 8am, as life is usually pretty quiet overnight on the list.

It turns out I forgot about it until about 10am and lost about 30p a share before dividends.

But I got into Shaun Murphy just as he was hitting the top, so I haven't missed out altogether.

B

I stayed up to invest the dividends in Ding Dong Whats-is-face over night, which came up quite nicely. I was late in moving out of that and into Murphy, so I expect to drop a bit on the leaderboard tomorrow. I might still have the two accounts in the top-30, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

And talking of leaderboards. How are you finding the dichotomy of holding oodles of cash in your downtraded state, and being absolutely nowhere on the leaderboard? My Gamma account is currently in 3,157th place with around £11m in it. When I look at its position in the leaderboard, those around me have the bearest minimu of icons, and a best ever position typically around the 1,000 mark. It does feel strange

I could have sworn that I was in the GD account when I posted that

Whatever. I've only broken into the Top 100 once, so the Leader Board won't worry me until I have a lot of good luck or the time to check the status of my account hourly, without forgetting. This two-word proviso being my major flaw.

This is a bit sad, but I was so determined to get the weekend's win bonuses right that I had an alarm clock beside me, set to go off at quarter an hour before the deadline.

B