2024 in Review - winners and losers across the StockRank spectrum

There’s no better way to close out a year than with a good review. You can envy the stocks that doubled, while cursing the commenters that kept you out. You can mock the stocks that halved, while forgetting they’re still in your kids ISAs. And, of course, you can dream how much better off you’d be, if only you’d not gone to cash in your mid-year panic.

So let’s dig into the stocks and stats and cut ourselves some slack. Investing is joy, regret and humour all at the same time. A tragedy and a comedy, with the endless promise of doing just a little bit better next year.

The numbers tell a story

2024 turned out to be remarkably... normal. From the 1st January to the 20th December, 90+ StockRank stocks returned 11% before dividends, which is right on their long term average. Add an average yield of 3.9%, and they generated a 15% total return. That’s good going in what were tough UK markets (the average price of all UK listed shares above a £10m market cap fell by 2% this year).

Good stocks climbed a wall of worry, while junk stocks took a battering. If you want to know why I never buy stocks at less than a 50 StockRank - the chart above explains it well. I really don’t fancy losing up to 32% in any year.

As they say, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. So let’s review a few more. If you picked a 90+ ranked share in 2024 you had a 57% chance of picking a winner. That’s not bad at all, but it’s also not great. In 2014 picking winners in the 90+ bucket was like shooting fish in a barrel. I drew 19 out of 20 winners that year. Let’s hope for a repeat in 2025.

We can line up the returns of all shares with a starting StockRank of 80 and visualise the distribution of winners and losers. As you can see below, there were a few shares with higher ranks that lost more than 50% in the year, but many more that gained 50-150%.

Contrast with stocks that had a starting StockRank of 50 or below.  If you bought these you really were playing with fire. Two-thirds of these "story stocks" lost you money. Sure, a few stories paid off big, but the odds were stacked against you.

You have to own enough stocks

Every year, someone will write in to cancel their subscription with the comment "I bought a 90+ ranked stock, and it fell 30%" Well, this may be a painful outcome, and I do empathise but it’s not unusual for a single stock portfolio. Just look how many dots are below the zero line at all levels of StockRank in the chart below. Individual stocks are very volatile!

Private investors often get greedy and buy just enough stocks to count on one hand. Not a good idea. The best way to have picked up the returns to the StockRanks was to have owned a minimum of 10 high-ranked stocks - and better 20.

The biggest high StockRank winners

There have been some fabulous returns in high-ranked shares this year. Six shares have more than doubled, giving out a string of “ahead of expectations” announcements through the year. The NAPS Portfolio (the model portfolio I run annually) managed to pick two of them in Metals Exploration and Greencore which is a great result.

Of the top 20, there were some notable themes:

• Four gold miners soared with the rising gold price - Pan African Resources having its day in the sun, Serabi Gold, Griffin Mining and Metals Exploration. Three of the six “doublers” were gold miners.
• Three large caps - Rolls Royce , International Consolidated Airlines, and Barclays.
• Two companies supplying own brand goods to supermarkets - BAKK and GNC.
• Construction and building materials back in vogue - Cairn Homes, Galliford Try, Keller, Morgan Sindall, Alumasc.
• And a broad tail of Software (Eleco, Cohort), Marketing Services (System 1, Nexxen International) and more.

And as I say almost every year, so many of these high ranked stocks were rather ignored at the start of the year. We’re terribly biased against solid companies, that plod along making profits, at cheap valuations. People want excitement so buy stocks like Avacta instead. Honestly, it beats me. The tortoise wins the race, every time.

Digging through the losers…

Sadly, there have been plenty of dogs among the high StockRank shares in 2024. Digging through the losers, we find plenty of broadly owned, past favourites in this list. ShoeZone, Serica Energy, Sanderson Design and Sylvania Platinum. Some of these names subscribers have made a lot of money on in the past.

Sylvania Platinum has been one of the most broadly owned stocks in the community after ten-bagging from 2017 to 2021. The decline has been painful, but Keelan Cooper does believe better times are ahead for the PGM sector.

Ingenta was picked in the NAPS Portfolio at the start of the year, and seemed popular with some smart private investors at an event in February. But it’s a tiny microcap, and the lack of liquidity can really hurt when things aren’t going your way. Caveat Emptor.

The magnetism of multibagging

Of all the tragedies that befell private investors in 2024, it was the lust for microcap multibaggers. The returns have been pretty dismal. AIM has gone back into a downtrend, and sub £50m market cap stocks kept declining. Sticking with higher ranked, stocks was the way to go across all size groups, but especially in large caps. The chart below illustrates it.

But the real reason we all love a microcap is the volatility. When they go, they really go. There were 23 stocks that doubled in 2024 (above a starting market cap of £10m). Nearly half of those were to be found in the sub £50m space, and not a single one in large caps. Your odds of finding a microcap multibagger might have been dismal, but that’s why you had a go.

The ones that got away…

So let’s cap this piece off with a final bit of FOMO. Below are the 23 stocks that have more than doubled in 2024, colour coded by their starting StockRank - with low ranks in red, mid ranks in amber and high ranks in green.

Yes the very biggest winners in the year had very low starting StockRanks. It’s the same almost every year. Lottery stocks really do sometimes payoff. That’s where nose to the ground fundamental research really can pay off. I always think that the lower the StockRank the greater the opportunity for a talented stock market researcher who has done their daily due diligence.

In that vein, the daily stock market reporting team managed to hustle out some big winners in 2024 in their annual watchlists that didn’t come from the 80+ StockRank set. CMC Markets (StockRank 71), Trustpilot (StockRank 54) and Beeks Financial Cloud (SR 30). And finally, well done to all those who toughed it out in N Brown - Deep Value investing really does work - but the journey to the payoff can be such a tough one!

Please do let us know your best, conviction ideas among the 80+ StockRank set for 2025 below, and which of the same stocks you absolutely think subscribers should avoid.

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*PPS - I do recommend downloading the 175 page ebook “Investing with the StockRanks” as a read through the New Year. It’s packed full of insights and strategies about how to make the most of the good, cheap, strong stocks that the StockRanks find in every market cycle.