Stockopedia Subscriber Performance Survey 2019

When you strip back all the political and economic turmoil of Brexit, 2019 turned out to be a solid year for UK shares.

That said, things got off to a shaky start. Markets were trading close to new lows as January 2019 got started. But that proved to be the bottom, and the mood turned bullish almost straight away. In fact, this time last year the market was risk-on with investors flooding back into shares.

In the end, it wasn’t quite a vintage year for PIs, but positive momentum was the prevailing trend. A last gasp, post-election rally in the final weeks took the small and large-cap indices up to between 11 and 14 percent for the year. That wasn’t a bad result given the economic unease that still hangs in the air.

But for many savvy investors in the Stockopedia community, 2019 proved to be much more profitable than that.

In recent years we’ve been keen to take the pulse of Stockopedia users. We’ve wanted to find out how confident they are feeling, and of course, how they’ve performed. Last summer, this routine check-up discovered some aches and pains. Markets were labouring and equities were under pressure. Stockopedia’s StockRanks were only moderately outperforming. But in our latest survey, covering nearly 1,200 subscribers, we’ve found things are much healthier...

Stock markets bounce back

In the 2018 Subscriber Performance Survey, published last year, it was clear that the going was pretty tough. Falling markets and moderate StockRank outperformance had combined to put pressure on subscriber portfolios. Back then, just over 50% said they’d outperformed or significantly outperformed the market since subscribing to the service, while 18% had underperformed or significantly underperformed.

In 2019, the results were much more upbeat. Seventy percent of respondents said they’d outperformed or significantly outperformed the market since joining Stockopedia, with 22% matching the index and just 8% underperforming it.

Since subscribing to Stockopedia has your performance outperformed, matched or underperformed the market?

Another big change between 2018 and 2019 was the scale of the average outperformance. In 2018, 45% of respondents said their portfolios had fallen in value by up to 20%, but only around 4% said the same in 2019. As you’d expect, it looks like it was harder to lose money in last year’s buoyant conditions.

In terms of winners, just over a third of respondents saw gains of between 10-20% in 2019. Another 29% of users saw returns in the 20-30% bracket and 14% of users soared through 30%-plus. That’s a very encouraging performance.

What has your 2019 performance been as a percentage year to date?

When it comes to Stockopedia features that have helped influence subscriber performance, StockReports and StockRanks are still the runaway favourites. Meanwhile, the daily Small Cap Value Report written by the brilliant Paul Scott and Graham Neary remains a go-to resource for many.

Which features have most impacted your returns?

Pleasingly, the StockRanks remain our most popular tool for investors - with nearly 70% of respondents saying these ranking tools had had the biggest impact on their returns.

In 2018, the highest ranking shares (with StockRanks of 80+) had a hard time in the market, falling 8% on average and only moderately outperforming the index. Last year, however, the performance was much better. After trending with the rising market through three quarters of the year, high ranking stocks soared in the final quarter - and flew as the market picked up in December. Overall, they came in with a 22% return versus 14.2% from the FTSE All Share.

As for the best performing stocks, our analysis once again shows a very broad list of names that our users credit for their biggest wins in 2019. The table below highlights the most widely held winners and how they performed:

Here are some of the takeaways:

• 6.3% of respondents said that Games Workshop was their biggest winner last year. Shares in the fantasy wargaming retailer soared by 100% in 2019, continuing a staggering run (it tripled in 2017 and had a strong year in 2018). Indeed roughly the same percentage of respondents credited GAW for their biggest gain in 2018, too.

• The second most widely held winner last year was the publishing group Future, which unleashed a 203% gain. That was followed by the airline and logistics group Dart, which saw its share price take off in the aftermath of the collapse of Thomas Cook.

• The biggest gain in this top list was at the oil & gas development company RockRose Energy, which saw its price rise by 243% in 2019. The move was triggered by a deal to buy production assets in the North Sea from Marathon Oil.

• Apple was the only non-UK quoted stock to make the widely held winners list. The shares had another phenomenal year in 2019, and it breached the GBP £1 trillion market cap level in the first week of January this year.

Given the success of 2019, you might expect confidence to be on the up among Stockopedia users, and that’s certainly what we found. More than 80% of respondents said they feel more confident in their understanding of the stock market since using the service. That’s up from around 75% in 2018.

Do you feel more or less confident in your understanding of the stock market since using Stockopedia?

Finally, how do Stockopedia users view themselves? What sort of investors are they and how much experience do they have?

Well, of all the respondents to the survey, broadly 30% defined themselves as Systematic Investors, another 30% defined themselves as Income/ Quality/ Buy-and-Hold Investors and around 25% said they were Active Stock Pickers - those three areas cover what we like to call the Farmers, Owners and Hunters. Traders and more novice (or undecided) investors made up the balance.

In terms of experience, the Stockopedia community has a fairly broad range of years spent investing, with nearly 40% of respondents saying they've got more than 20 years of experience behind them:

How many years have you been directly investing in shares?

Once again, thanks to everyone who completed the survey. The responses offer a fascinating view of the Stockopedia community and how it is performing on average. It’s useful not just for readers but in shaping the ideas for new tools and site features in the future, so we really do appreciate it.

As ever - Safe investing