Encouraged by Ed Croft's recent webinar, I decided to diversify into European shares. Ed's chart showed European high stockrank shares outperforming any other region, however I'm not sure which countries were the major contributors to performance - the gyrations of the Turkish lira would not be conducive to a sound night's sleep, and I'd be reluctant to invest in a country as riddled by corruption as Romania or Bulgaria.
I buy my shares through Hargreaves Lansdown, and the following is the list of European exchanges on which they carry out trading - Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Deutsche Boerse, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Irish, Italian, Lisbon, Luxembourg, Madrid, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm, Swiss, Vienna. Not too bad a list, but I would have been happy to see the Greek and Polish exchanges included.
I followed the procedure that Ed has demonstrated for creating his Naps portfolio - I screened for the highest ranked European shares in companies with a market cap > £100m in each of the 10 Stockopedia sectors, and chose the two highest-ranked shares in each sector. Even after I'd excluded the shares on exchanges which HL do not deal with, it transpired that they would not quote for all the shares listed on the above exchanges. However, after a bit of toing and froing I succeeded in buying £5000 worth of each of 20 highly ranked shares.
One share that I bought has a stockrank of 49, the rest range between 74 and 99 (the majority are in the 90s). I have one turnaround, one neutral, five high-flyers and the rest are superstocks. I have 8 balanced, 6 adventurous, four speculative and two conservative.
This is real black box investing - the only company that I had previously heard of is Fiat Chrysler (which has risen by > 80% in the past year), so I'll be interested to see the results. I will apply a trailing stop loss of 15% and will rebalance after 6 months.
I have recently started investing in European shares but have struggled a little as a) my online broker does not have as good coverage as HL, and b) I've found it more difficult to assess quality, e.g. competitive advantage, for EU shares (just seems to be harder to find the relevant information). Probably a more quantitative systematic approach, like the 'NAPS' type one approach you are applying, would be the best option. I expect you should do well - good luck!
Out of interest would you mind sharing a list of the shares you picked this way?
