What Works?

This week, Megan has been looking at Adventurous Growth strategies, which are stocks on the Stockopedia Style Map that are high quality and have high momentum:

We know that the Quality and Momentum Rank are positively correlated due to the inclusion of measures of earnings momentum in both measures:

We are fortunate at Stockopedia to have a community of successful investors who have built portfolios worth more than £1m in their ISAs and kindly agreed to share their insights. In this series of articles we will explore their investment strategies and key lessons learned on how to pick stocks and manage risk when building a portfolio. Whether you are…

We are fortunate at Stockopedia to have a community of successful investors who have built portfolios worth more than £1m in their ISAs and kindly agreed to share their insights. In this series of articles we will explore their investment strategies and key lessons learned on how to pick stocks and manage risk when building a portfolio. Whether you…

At first glance, converting annual ISA contributions of £20,000 into a portfolio worth £1 million might seem almost impossible in a typical working lifetime.

However, I think the numbers I’ll share with you here tell us that for an investor using their full ISA allowance each year, building a £1m portfolio may be a reasonable goal.

Later…

If you’re a British citizen over the age of 18, there is nothing to stop you from having both an ISA and a Sipp. Both are efficient wrappers to help your investments grow free of capital gains and dividend tax.

But which allowance should you use first? And are there other factors you should consider before setting…

Some investors may have never bothered to use their ISA allowance. The current Capital Gains Tax allowance of £12,300 may have seemed generous enough to cover any gains, while a tax-free dividend amount of £2,000 may have covered most of the portfolio income. But, unfortunately, this relatively generous allowance is coming to an end, as the following table shows:

Picking a platform for your Stocks and Shares ISA is not an easy decision. Wade too deeply into the world of price comparison and you can find yourself in a complicated tangle of calculations as you try to work out the cheapest option.

It is also a very personal decision - you need to pick the platform which…

The biggest advantage of investing in an ISA is the tax relief. Any returns you make on your investments are tax-free. This means no income, capital gains, or dividend tax on any of the returns in your account. And the savings from that tax bill can be significant - as we noted in our recent ISA guide, an investor…

Since its launch in 1999, the Individual Savings Account (ISA) has offered British investors a tax-free haven for their savings. Introduced by then-chancellor Gordon Brown, the ISA has saved investors tens of billions in capital gains and income tax. Indeed, this year alone, the tax wrapper is expected to save Britons over £7bn.

But by helping savers, the ISA…

If you’re anything like me, the Covid-years have thrown off your recollection of time. What state was the global economy in at the start of 2022? Was the UK in a lockdown or just anticipating one? Who was the prime minister? I recently retrieved my skiing jacket from the wardrobe and found a mask in the pocket. That means that…

Since global stock markets began their downward spiral in April, every sector has underperformed the FTSE All Share.

This depressing statistic can partly be explained by the fact that the All Share is a value weighted index and has therefore been disproportionately elevated by the relative outperformance of the largest companies on the market.…

It’s rough out there. The long anticipated bear market is at last upon us. In the UK, the FTSE All Share has fallen 10% in the year to date, while AIM - where stock pickers like to congregate - has fared even worse. In the US, the S&P 500 - a long-time haven for passive investors - is down more…

There’s a saying in investing that “time in the market beats timing the market”. In other words, long-term trends in stock markets are overwhelmingly positive. The longer you stay invested, the more you can take advantage of the compounding effects of being exposed to them.

On the other side of that argument however, is the idea that selling up when…

When we launched the 2020 Stock Picking Challenge late last year, it’s fair to say that nobody was predicting the kind of drama we’ve witnessed in the first quarter.

Coronavirus is causing misery for many people. And from an investment standpoint, the sudden and severe economic impact has plunged markets into turmoil.

Earnings are unknown, forecasts mean nothing,…

A few months after launching the Woodford Equity Income Fund in June 2014, Neil Woodford’s team published what’s known as its Active Share score. In doing so, they made a bold statement about the type of investor that Mr Woodford was...

Active Share is a way of measuring how ‘active’ a fund manager is (when it comes to…

A reputation takes a lifetime to build and a second to destroy. Over the past two years, watching the Woodford Equity Income Fund (WEIF) go from more than £10bn of assets under management to less than £3bn has been like seeing a mountain turn to rubble. The aftershocks continue to be felt across the fund management industry.

A nasty…

As a direct equities investor, I've never taken much interest in funds, but you couldn't avoid the Woodford Capital saga. Stockopedia HQ is in Oxford, and it was notable that Neil Woodford decided to set up shop on the ring road here. Initially raising a few billion, before growing assets under management well above £10bn. We tried to interview him…

It has become hard to tell the difference between silly season and the realities of what Brexit (especially a ‘no-deal’ Brexit) might actually be. This week we’ve had eye-catching scare stories about stockpiling food and medicine and the prospect of motorways being turned into permanent lorry parks...

With less than eight months to go before the official leave date,…

Over the past 30 years a number of investors and academics have been categorical about the power of investing in small companies. As a result, the size effect - the notion that small stocks outperform large stocks on average over time - has become an investing truism. But is that fair?

An interesting feature of the size effect -…

First Officer: “Captain - one of our engines is failing.”
Captain: “Set throttle to maximum thrust on the failing engine.”

Even if you have never watched a sci-fi movie before, our captain’s response may sound a little odd to you, and for good reason. Engineering systems are designed to reallocate resources away from failing components and towards working components to…

It’s sometimes hard to know the provenance of investing’s best known sayings, but the excellent term “diworsification” is usually credited to Peter Lynch. In his 1989 book One Up on Wall Street the ex-Fidelity fund manager made it clear that the wrong kind of diversification was a bad thing.

In context, Lynch was talking about the problem of companies…

With just a few weeks to go until the end of the year, it’s inevitable that thoughts start turning to portfolio housekeeping and making new investment resolutions for 2018.

Overall, it’s been a strong year for equities. Strategies that target small-cap growth companies have done particularly well, and we’ve seen noticeable strong returns in higher quality value strategies, too.

The subject of Stop Losses provokes heated discussion here on Stockopedia. Opinions are divided on how, why, when, where and if you should set a pre-defined exit price on a trade. Some investors won’t use stop losses, but others can’t live without them.

One of the biggest questions about stop losses is why they should even be used in the…

I genuinely do sympathise with anyone who started investing in stock markets for the first time in January 2016. It's not been an easy environment - but let’s get one thing straight it’s not exactly been bad. If you've invested through 2000 and/or 2008 you'll know what bad really is and it’s much, much worse than it is now. The…

On our journey to build the very best data service and toolbox for investors, our team at Stockopedia has developed an investment philosophy. It’s obvious that investing is a very personal business; everyone is driven by different aims, timeframes and risk appetites. But we believe that getting to grips with a set of four broad principles can set investors on…

So I'm sitting down to watch the first match of the Brazilian world cup and I realise that my 7 year old son knows the name of every single player on the pitch. Not only that but he knows their positions and their shirt numbers too. Now I'm not totally ignorant on football matters, but his depth and understanding of…

Individual share prices are astoundingly volatile. A useful practical measure of volatility is the difference between the high and low of a share's price over a twelve month period. Since September 2013 the average share on the London Stock Exchange has a high price more than double its low - yes more than double, 112% to be precise. When you…

A lot of what we do at Stockopedia is based on the premise that it's not so hard for a typical investor to 'be their own fund manager' - that using the best quality fundamental data to implement a systematic approach to the stock market can reap substantial rewards over the long term. Yes you can beat the City.