A fairly quiet Sunday. Trip down to the gym for the last of my three weekly visits, finding that they were finishing their 24 hour Charity Spinathon, £20 duly donated. En route, listening to the last of a two hour John Gruber Podcast talking at length about Crypto currencies, which was fascinating. Then back home for a walk to the local shops with Jane to pick up some milk, then back to catching up on my various high technology news feeds.

I reflect on Robots getting more and more impressive. Saw a video of a guy in Germany debugging a table tennis playing robot, which is already showing promise (3 minute video here). Then saw that on Tuesday, there is a match planned between Timo Boll, the #1 German Professional Table Tennis Player (currently #8 in the world), playing against a KUKA industrial robot (preview here). Robots are one feature that keeps hitting news headlines concerning Google, who are making many related investments recently.

On a related thought, one thing that has started to bug me a bit is the so far excellent performance of my Self Invested Pension, which over the last 10 months has grown 10.68%. Given 64% of it is in an index tracker, the performance of various stocks i’ve traded (normally on a long term buy and hold basis) has been over 24% to date. The nagging feeling is always asking if i’m carrying too much of too few companies, albeit I tend to focus on ones that I feel have high market shares and future growth potential.

I’ve made good returns trading in then later out on Netflix, Splunk and Salesforce.com. I got slight losses from the early days in Red Hat, ARM, Baidu and Facebook, so reversed out with minimal damage. I made a returns of over 20% on GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT) and 49% on Liquid Metal (LQMT) in 3 weeks by joining the dots on some future Apple investments from patent filings. Those apart, I wound up investments in Google, Amazon, Apple and (having IPO’d) Tableau. I have more recently taken a position in Facebook (it was in the $20’s when I left it, and bought back in recently at $69).

One personal irritation about the Advertising Industry is its relentless pursuit to derive advertising revenue on mobile phones. This is a practice I hold akin to having a kiddie jumping up and down in front of the telly when you’re trying to watch something; something to be actively discouraged. The one concern I have is that Google are my biggest shareholding (at the time of writing, they represent just under 50% of my (non Index Tracker) stock investments), and derive almost all its revenue today from monetising purchase intentions – read: targeted advertising. Likewise Facebook.

Something that impressed me greatly with Facebook was CEO Mark Zuckerberg buying SMS app “WhatsApp”, which has over 400 million users (70% using the service daily) for a jaw dropping $19 billion. The ethos of WhatsApp is to never let advertising interfere with the user experience, instead relying on a nominal $1/year subscription to use their service. Despite that being the antithesis of Facebook’s current business model, they put the WhatsApp CEO straight onto the Facebook Board. While it may sound a very basic simplification, their willingness to do this sort of “eat our children” move gives me confidence that they are aiming for the long term – and not clamouring to keep hold of a business model that may go stale.

With that, I turn to Google. I put £40,834 in them and have so far seen that go up to £54,508 – an approx return of 35%. Around 98% of their current income is tied to advertising revenues. I have quite a wide view of the various initiatives they are undertaking, which while mind-blowing, don’t translate into a likely future revenue/profit stream for the next two years or so. Maybe Chrome Tablets will arrive. Maybe they’ll cotton on that it may be a good idea to sell their excellent ChromeCast outside the USA. One thing I don’t yet understand well is their fixation – and many investments – in both Deep Thinking technologies and in Robotics.

The fact they may pull a rabbit out of their hat on one of a wide range of initiatives means i’ll leave my shareholding in them where it is. Likewise the shareholdings held by my three grandchildren (Ellie age 12, Charlie age 9 and Ruby age 2 all have shares in Google, Amazon and Tableau alongside their index trackers). Google shares will split in April, so I think a likely increase as their Google shares get more liquid. After that, we’ll see if the value of those shares continue their relentless march northward.

I’m also confident Amazon will bounce back – I reckon up another 20% in the next quarter to recover from their recent downturn. Apple and Facebook will soldier on. Tableau Software will continue to impress (they are my highest returns to date – over 67% at the time of writing). Those apart, i’m keeping my eye out for signs of three potential IPOs that I think will become very valuable – when they’re ready. But that’s a story for another day.