Another week and yet another soft interview for Mark Gustafson, CEO, of Challenger Acquisitions (CHAL), this time at Sharepickers. Desperation is setting in as time is running out and the only buyer in any volume is no longer able to buy. It’s not looking good.

Oy vey. It's been a week since Tom has walked away from editing the site, and yet five out of the top-10 stories are Tom's Bearcasts. And he didn't even record them every day.

In this podcast I discuss pruning here in Bristol, an update on the Gooseberry crumble and then the lessons about how folks behave as investors or rather gamblers we can learn from the Worthington (WRN) fraud which must now be brown bread as explained HERE earlier today following news on Friday. That section also mentions Cloudtag (CTAG) and tech stocks. Then I look at commercial suicide, the curse of the tipster and Bluebird Merchant Ventures (BMV).

On Friday July 1 NunaMinerals was put into administration. I therefore suggested a day or two later, that the RTO whereby Nuna took over Main Market fraud Worthington (WRN) was off and that on Monday 4 July the UKLA would have to take action. Amazingly the chocolate teapots have done nothing. Truly these folk make the oxymorons at AIM Regulation look like a collection of Nobel prize winners. But it gets worse.

Often when you take a look at the assets of tiny companies which people are getting excited about, it is hard to see why anywhere near as much value is being attributed to them as there often is.

As Gulf Keystone (GKP) sputters toward its inevitable fate, the hunt is on to spot the next equity wipeout in this space. There are quite a few runners and riders. I mentioned Xcite (XEL) a while back and Premier Oil (PMO) is also in the frame.  My nap however is Igas Plc (IGAS) as the next for the chop.

ShareProphets AIM-China Filthy Forty member LED International Holdings (LED) has been suspended from trading since 22 Dec 2015 – we are well into month seven of suspension, then. AIM Rule 41 says: “The Exchange will cancel the admission of AIM securities where these have been suspended from trading for six months”. Yet LED has still not been given the order of the boot by AIM Regulation. I dropped our friendly Oxymorons a line….

From the FCA's spreadsheet of short positions required to be disclosed to it, the following details the shorted AIM shares at the end of June (by net short position %) - and if the positions have increased (red), reduced (green) or remained unchanged (black) since last month...

Full disclosure: I am a gold-bug. I love gold. And I think the economic doom-mongers like Peter Schiff make fantastic arguments for a radically higher gold price. We are in uncharted monetary territory which threatens the fundamental integrity of our paper currencies. But I also know that investing on the basis of an impending apocalypse means betting on something that has never happened before. History tells us that stock markets and most of their constituents tend to survive wars, disasters, economic collapse, etc.

Tom Winnifrith has stuck the knife into AIM-listed Servision plc (SEV) more times than Avanti (AVN) has missed performance targets – see HERE. And so today we learn that the company has amended the terms of a financing package with YA II PN Ltd (otherwise known as Yorkville) which involved a loan agreement backed by a standby equity distribution agreement (SEDA) – for that, read “death spiral”. But the comedy is in the text of the RNS.

Hello Share Bouncers. I am now back at my desk following a very invasive operation the day before. However the team carrying it out was a modal of politeness, friendliness and efficiency. Would that some of Britain’s Chef execs were as useful. There’s a very competent management at the National Grid (NG.) too. But that’s not the big factor in the current ballooning share price. The value has shown a 14% rise since Brexit. A few days ago it was another 2% higher than that.

Having previously been positive on shares in IndigoVision Group (IND), I last concluded, with the shares then at 267.5p, that it was difficult to be particularly confident and that I’d look for safer value elsewhere (see HERE). I now update with the shares currently approaching 6% lower today, at 123.5p, on the back of a trading update for the first half of 2016…

I’ve said before that there are plenty of good statistical and theoretical reasons to buy into old companies. Churchill China (CHH) may be a record-breaker for longevity: it traces its origins back to 1795, as it proudly includes in its URL, churchill1795.com. But investors are kept well up-to-date, and today receive a trading update for the six months to the end of June.

Shares in Avanti Communications (AVN), once the darling of AIM, collapsed by 60% yesterday amid all sorts of horrors emerging. It is a big story and most papers are covering it, at least with a mention. But in the Daily Telegraph there is nothing ....except

If one takes a disclosable stake in a listed company you must notify the company within five working days and it must by the close of the next working day, notify the market. So we should be seeing a TR1 from Highlands Natural Resources (HNR) today then. If we do not then investors have been spoofed.

Commenting on today-announced results for the company’s year ended 30th April 2016, Ilika (IKA) Chairman, Mike Inglis, notes “since my appointment as Non-Executive Chairman at the AGM last September, I have been very encouraged to see the technical progress and increased commercial focus at Ilika. The definition of a clear solid state battery roadmap and the launch of the Stereax M250 have been important milestones on the road to commercial success”. The following reviews with the shares currently more than 14% lower, at 45p…

I have spent the morning getting twitter grief for this article but the one polite twitter enquiry concerns BoxHill (BOX) and I answer that in this podcast as well as explaining why shares are both up and down since Brexit - it all depends how you look at it. I also cover Gulf Keystone (GKP), Bluebird Merchant Ventures (BMV), Advanced Oncotherapy (AVO) and Avanti Communications (AVN), I meant to talk about Bovis (BVS) but forgot. I shall try to remember tomorrow when I am down to make a gooseberry crumble. I shall report back on that over the weekend.

Those familiar with my Sub-Standard Shockers XI will know that Senterra Energy (SEN) is the player manager of the team, it being an Optiva Securities vehicle, and yesterday’s confusing RNS on its potential acquisition warranted an update.

I would expect the collapse in the Avanti Communications (AVN) share price to continue. You cannot say this site did not warn you. In this bonus bearcast I run through 14 red flags which apply to Avanti and which I managed to jot down in less than ten minutes. Drat! I missed an obvious 15th: the promise to move from AIM to the Main Market. It did not happen. Companies that promise the jump but don't make it (think Quindell) are always red flagged.

Yesterday I served up pictures of four Welsh folks and asked for the odd one out and - to the suprise of some readers, as you can see HERE, it had nothing to do with sheep. The four pictured taffies were: Cerys Matthews the gorgeous lead singer with the uber-Welsh group Catatonia ( part of the cool Cymru scene of the 1990s), Welsh windbag Neil Kinnock, Welsh soccer star Gareth Bale and David Williams the uber Welsh CEO of Avanti Communications (AVN) who had a rather bad day at the office yesterday and is going to have another shocker today