My shitty investments challenge: IGAS - 99.4% down!

The my shitty investments challenge is a great initiative by @trumpman, inviting us to reflect on our biggest investment failings.

Probably my biggest investment failure, in more ways than one, was in IGas - a gas and oil exploration company.

I'm a whopping 99.4% down on my initial £1000 investment seven years ago:

When I bought my shares back in 2013, IGas was starting to move into fracking for shale gas, so I bought-in betting on the fact that the the then Conservative government would give the green light to this controversial method of resource-extraction.

My thinking at the time was that it was about time for the Tories to start showing their true neoliberal colours, deregulate everything and shred the environment in order to make a quick buck.

Especially when IGas' explorations were all in the North of England - no one in London gives a toss about the north (think Cersei Lanister in Game of Thrones, that's about the attitude).

Instead, pretty soon after I made that investment, it turned out that Cameron and quite a few others actually had a green conscience and the country turned its back on shale-gas exploration, preferring to stick to other means of securing our energy.

I think the problem was other companies were doing explorations in the home-counties, I remember going to one protest in Sussex, near a quintessentially English village, and I guess that did it for Shale in the UK - Tories live in those kinds of areas, and you can't exactly save the Tories in the south while allowing fracking in the North - we don't have a Federal system when it comes to that sort of thing in England.

Without fracking, here's what happened to the IGAS price, I've highlighted when I bought it, pretty much right at the peak:

This was also an ethical failure

In terms of my own personal ethics, this investment is also a double failure. I'm also green at heart - I even went on a couple of local anti-fracking protests a few years back - I'd much rather our energy come from renewables.

However, I couldn't resist the urge to make a quick killing, and somehow i was able to hold the idea of being at fracking protests while supporting the companies doing the fracking.

TBH I don't really know how that happened.... I think I must have gone share-crazy. Or maybe my cynicism dial was just up to 100?

Anyway, I've still got those shares, but I think I have to count them as a write off. Having looked at the company's latest news - they're cutting executive salaries and part-replacing them with shares, I'm sure that's not a good sign!

And shame on me for compromising my ethics!

Nominations

I nominate @slobberchops, @goblinknackers and @starkerz to make their own shitty investment posts here on leofinance!

I know all three of them like a good investment, and I'm sure they've got some clangers!

They're also three Brits with three of the best handles on Hive!

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