I can’t say I know an awful lot about AIM-listed Victoria Oil and Gas (VOG), beyond its (still) pending farm-out deal with fellow AIM-listed Bowleven (BLVN) which continues to await approval from the Cameroon authorities. But I do know is a 20% share price fall and an unfortunate after-hours RNS looks pretty bad – both for the company and for AIM in general. The question is what went on and whether the company and its Nomad behaved badly, or whether it was simply the effect of the blind application of AIM Rules.

In part one of the review of Julie Meyer's career as an an investor we finished our round-up with Taggstar, a company where Julie "doing the will of God" Meyer MBE was the sole director until 12 April 2017 and which went tits up in June 2017 leaving unpaid bills of £924,340. The report of the liquidator is damning and accuses Julie and Ariadne Capital of fraud and theft.

Metal Tiger (MTR) has updated on drilling results from the project in the Kalahari Copper Belt, Botswana in which it has a 30% interest, including “highest grade intersection to date at T3 from latest and final batch of assay results”…

According to companies House ex Dragon's Den  Julie "doing God's will" Meyer MBE is or has been a director of 13 companies. Flagship Ariadne Capital Limited is now in administration, while EntrepreneurCountry Global has some "interesting" accounts and you would not bet the ranch on it surviving long as explained HERE. 

Previously writing on marketing services group System1 (SYS1) in October I concluded that the circa 400p share price looked to not reflect the trading risks and to continue to avoid. Today a Trading Update announcement…

There is religion. There is evangelical religion. And there is Holy Trinity Brompton Religion. HTB to its pals. It is a church, dominated by the rich and well heeled, whose pastor Nicky Gumbel pioneered the Alpha Course, the zealous evangelical outreeach programme designed to breath fresh life - and an uncompromising message - into the Cof E. And Praise be the Lord...I see that Julie Meyer MBE tweets away for she is among the faithful.

This time last year I was worried about stock markets. Most had been going up for too long and were too expensive and I thought that this great bull market must be near an end. I was worried about politics: the QE-driven rise in wealth inequality was having consequences – most obviously Corbynism and Trumpism. I expected to see growing state interference in the economy as governments tried to shift profits from managers and shareholders to workers and I was especially concerned that the monopolistic US tech stocks would end up at the centre of that storm. As usual I was a bit early. Last year offered a fair amount of political turmoil but not that much drama.

 In 2016 to great fanfare Julie Meyer's Ariadne Capital announced that it had secured the services of Ilona Simpson as a "senior advisor and venture partner". Heck who would not want to work with Julie Meyer MBE, a member of the great and the good. Ilona is clearly a real BSD in the world of auto and this was a big hire for Meyer. Wind forward to today in Royal Courts of Justice at 2PM

Hello, Share Samplers. Many years ago, I lost money on a company called Stanelco. It became Biome Technologies (BIOM) and I had another go. After a few moribund years, it suddenly took off and I sold to make a fair fist of dough. The reason the price spurted was that there was a hoo-hah in the media about takeaway coffee cups. The huge majority of them cannot be recycled, which means millions of the little beggars are cluttering up the environment. In Blighty alone, we get through two and a half billion disposable cups a year.

In today's podcast I start with a few more words on Julie Meyer MBE although my formal series on her will only continue tomorrow. Then it is onto Neil Woodford in light of today's most excellent piece by Cynical Bear here. Finally I comment on the fraud MySquar (MYSQ) in light of today's article in the Sunday Times.

The Mail on Sunday headline says it all " Brexit fears are diverting cash from vital cancer battle say drug firms." That sod Boris Johnson and the witch Priti Patel - now they are causing more cancer patients to die. Bastards! Er....

Often when it comes to AIM companies investors get far too fixated on revenue and orderbooks, and forget that in reality it all comes down to the bottom line and the actual net profit that the company is either already making, or is likely to make.

I wouldn’t normally cover stocks listed on the Oslo exchange but Thin Film Electronics was mentioned in the comments of a recent Woodford piece and I also noted it was the Share Punt of the Week in the Daily Mail on Friday, so if it is good enough for them to recommend a Woodford-backed cash guzzler to its brain dead readers, it is appropriate for me to provide another side to that story, especially as the cash burn here is off the scale.

There was a time when Premier African Minerals (PREM) looked to have genuine potential, but in the few years since then it has consistently disappointed investors and is now trading at a fraction of the share price it once hit.

I’ve been a bit preoccupied in recent weeks with a certain fund manager so thought I should catch up with a few old friends on AIM this weekend but it transpires that not a lot has actually happened. It made me realise more than ever that AIM is much more about the travelling I hope than the arriving. Accordingly, I thought it was more appropriate to write a piece heralding the 7 Mythical Wonders of the AIM Casino instead.

In the UK, cannabis stocks are fever dreams of bulletin board morons. Here in Canada, it's respectable news in the quality newspaper financial pages.

Shares in MySquar (MYSQ) recently more than doubled valuing the disreputable Myanmar (Burma) play at around £22 million, a ludicrous sum for a transparent scam that stands out even when measured by the exalted standards of AIM.

Previously writing on Obtala (OBT) we noted its view that “in an environment of low interest rates with investors hunting for yield, there is an outsized opportunity to fund our trading business to many multiples of current revenue and profit levels”. There’s now a “Trade Finance Update”…

We review the performance of the shorted AIM shares as at the start of each year. For 2017 that review is HERE and, from the FCA's spreadsheet of short positions required to be disclosed to it, we now have the shorted AIM shares at the start of 2018...

 hope over the festive period all your Christmas cards and parcels were both received and sent successfully.  Personally I still await the successful delivery of a book I self-gifted...but rather than turn this into a self-centred rant I thought we would talk about the Royal Mail (RMG).