After nearly a year of writing these columns at Stockopedia, I’ve learned a lot.
In no small part, this has been thanks to all of you who have taken the time to read and comment on my articles. Thanks to your contributions, I have more of an idea of the kind of stocks that interest you. I also have a much deeper understanding of the data behind Stockopedia’s truly excellent service.
Having talked things over with Ed and the team at Stockopedia, we’ve decided to raise the stakes by introducing an element of performance tracking to my selections. My review of last year’s stock choices was one of the most popular articles I’ve written for Stockopedia, so this seems a logical direction to go in. After all, the only real point of active investing is to try and beat the market.
At this point I must emphasise that I’m NOT about to start giving share tips. What I am going to do is to use a screening approach along with my own analysis to build and run a model portfolio. This will be publicly available as a fantasy fund here on Stockopedia. I’m going to run the portfolio in a mostly systematic way, in keeping with the Stockopedia philosophy. So there’ll be regular rebalancing and a screen which will be used to maintain a shortlist of stocks I might consider including.
I’ll also use an element of human judgement and analysis. I won’t automatically add every stock which qualifies for the screen to the portfolio. I’ll pick and choose which to add, and will continue to analyse stocks in depth as I have been doing over the last year. Time will tell how this affects my returns, but it should make things more interesting and enable me to maintain a decent level of diversification.
Although the portfolio will be the main focus of my articles, it won’t be the only topic. I’ll also continue to cover other stocks that might be of particular interest, from both bullish and bearish perspectives.
Now that I’ve set the scene, let me explain the investing rules I’ll be using in a little more details.
Stock selection rules
My goal was to create a portfolio that stays true to the fundamental principles of Stockopedia’s StockRanks system. I (hope) I’ve done this by targeting stocks offering a blend of value, growth, momentum and quality.
The criteria I’ve…
