The story of a small electric scooter startup and the Idiot Investor + Stock Portfolio Update May

Come on all gather around for a startup rugs to riches to rugs story. It was October of 2017, probably a rainy day or not I cannot recall. My investing itches started coming to life, I was a young software engineer one year after my first normal monthly salary job, before that I had finished my military service and previously I was under freelance contracts.
I had gathered my 3-6 months emergency fund, I had no clue back then it was called that, and I was ready to unleash my internal investor to make me money for my future. I started looking around for opportunities and what a European / Greek investor can do with limited funds. And of course I landed on a startup crowdfunding platform, my first investment was to a Dutch Electric scooter company with a scooter design named “Appscooter” yes silly name they were riding the mobile apps wave then, pun intended. The scooter would feature a smartphone screen with various things and it would be electric with interchangeable batteries. The smart screen didn’t appeal to me but the electric part always fascinated me.

At that time Tesla had only released the Roadster and Model S, while the Model 3 that exploded the company were starting to roll out of from the Fremont factory in California. I am not aware if Tesla was on my radar back then but for sure I always believed that Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) would soon come to an end.

Long story short I found the crowdfunding in Seedrs about this company and invested about half of my then monthly salary, I believed that it could be done and of course I was right. It was done by another company though. Last year I saw a documentary about a Taiwanese company that was actually producing electric scooters with interchangeable batteries and also it has a battery swapping network for charging them up. Its name is Gogoro, better than appscooter of course. At that point I became certain to me that my investment was lost, and I was right again. The best thing that Appscooter had done until then was rebranding to Etergo…. Anyway time passed by and my startup investing dream was a thing of the past. Etergo raised some more millions in funding in an increased valuation but still needed more cash to burn through like a fuel hungry Ford Mustang.

From the start of the year Etergo was still raising money either from convertible notes or various investors but it still needed more money with ZERO scooters out of the production line. Sidenote: ZERO is an actual company producing electric motorcycles also in California.
So at end of May the news broke, the company was sold off for scraps comparing to its “Valuation” to Ola electric an Indian company. I was happy. It would return to me 1/10 of my investment that’s better than 0, I had written of my books that investement entirely. The money were returned immediately and then I send them to Revolut and bought one gram of Gold from the new commodities feature that is now available to everyone. That was the gold lining of the story, pun also intended but it would be more fitting if silver was also available for investing via Revolut though.

Stock Portfolio Update May 2020

I continued my investment strategy of buying 3 new stocks every month for long term holding. I must admit that I also opened short term positions on EventBrite, Ebraer and Under Armour against my own advice see previous post. The first two did not provide anything more than the fees charged by Revolut. Under Armour (UA) would return to me more than 22% but Revolut glitched out yesterday and never carried out the Sell order and of course after that (UA) lost immediately 5%.

Below you can see my open positions, in June I will reach my long term position companies goal and from then own I will start increasing my investments in the already existing ones.