Okay, I’m haven’t got rich by the standards of some wealthy individuals - but I’ve done pretty well for myself in the last 12 months. I bought shares in five Australian mining companies a year ago and I sold them last week. I had $100,000 to invest which I split it into four $25,000 chunks and bought:

  • Compass Resources CMR at $0.54 per share
  • BHP Billiton BHP at $16.30 per share
  • Oxiana OXR at $0.83 per share
  • Kagara Zinc KZL at $1.19 per share

Following the recent correction in world stock markets and my own feeling that the recent resource boom may have run out of steam - at least for the short and medium term, I sold all of my shares last week for:

  • Compass Resources CMR at $3.60 per share
  • BHP Billiton BHP at $28.65 per share
  • Oxiana OXR at $2.95 per share
  • Kagara Zinc KZL at $3.54 per share

The bottom line is, in just one year I grew $100,000 to $373,800. I’ll have to pay capital gains tax on the gain but, fortunately, this is halved because I didn’t sell the shares within a year of buying them. Given the recent carnage in share markets, I was tempted to sell earlier than I did but I held on for the the tax benefits.

So far Australia has proved to be a very lucky country for us. I wouldn’t have thought about investing in mining companies in the UK, but there’s so much stuff in the media about mining here - it’s a huge player in the Australian economy - I read up about it, saw the appetite for Australian metals in Asia and bought shares.

Now I’ll have to decide how I’m going to allocate my gains. I hope it won’t prove to be a case of “a fool and his money are soon parted”.