One of the features I have always loved about Stockopedia is the Fantasy Funds capability. I know that you can run fantasy portfolios on lots of sites but I think Stockopedia does them particularly well although its surprising to me sometimes how underused they are.
I personally find the insight into how other people are investing and trading in their portfolios (real or not) to be useful to me. It helps me to generate ideas and I can see how different strategies work in different market conditions. In my view, if I can see what is working or not working for other people then that information may well be useful to me.
I’m working on the assumption that the same principle will apply if I share my thinking behind the Technology Trend portfolio, maybe others will look at the choices being made and get some use out of them. I plan to update this article with details of which shares I am buying and selling into the fund and why. It won’t be as detailed an analysis as you might find in Stockopedia’s own articles or from many of the other excellent contributions from subscribers but I hope it will still be useful to someone.
I have been running my Fantasy Fund (Technology Trend: https://www.stockopedia.com/fa... ) for over 2 years now and March 2019 marks the one year anniversary of me “rebranding” the fund and giving it the more specific Technology Trend purpose. Up until March 2018 I had been pursuing a general investing strategy loosely based on the principles in Naked Trader’s books but with tweaks of my own. When you look at the chart up until March 2018, it looks like the strategy was working really well – the returns are great but consider that those returns took place against the backdrop of one of the “easiest” periods of time to make money in the Stockmarket that I have ever seen. You could have bought a US Index tracker and done incredibly well, you could have bought just about anything and done very well, or at least it feels like that looking back.
So, in March 2018 I was arrogant enough to think “This is too easy! I started to consider what would happen if I tried pursuing a more niche strategy. Would my returns get better or worse if I…
Todays buys...... today I added Electronic Arts and Upwork to the fund. In each case I bought my normal 50k starter amount.
Why?
In the case of £EA its a momentum play based around the performance and hype around their Apex Legend title. Today my 10 year old son declared to me that "Fortnite was dead and Apex Legends is the thing everyone is playing" and that was good enough for me to start a holding in the Technology Trend portfolio (and also in my own real world portfolio). Of course a company like £EA shouldn't really move on a single title but Apex Legends now has 50 million players after only 2 weeks since it was released. It took Fortnite 4 months to reach the same number. The media hype is likely to increase and i think that will drag up the SP. I will sell if I think the momentum is beginning to drop off, either the share price momentum or the media hype momentum.
In the case of £UPWK , I only just realized that this company had IPO'ed. A Motley Fool newsletter alerted me today to the fact that it had and come to the market in November 2018 and I had somehow missed it.
I have been a user of Upwork for many years now and I really like the way the site works and the general gig economy story around the stock, I feel it has great potential. For those who are not aware, Upwork is the "Uber of Freelance work", you can use it to hire just about anyone to do freelance work for you like website design or graphic design or voiceovers or illustrations or coding or 100 other things.
That doesn't of course mean its a great investment but it doesn't seem too expensive and i'm willing to buy some and see how it plays out. Again, I expect to add this to my real world portfolio in the coming week.
