This summer I spent some time vacationing in the UK and bought some investing magazines at the airport on the way home to Norway. One of the magazines had an insert about Stockopedia and I was curious enough to register for a free trial period. I was very interested to read about Ed’s NAPS and SNAPS portfolios, so interested that I decided to try for myself. I decided to use real money to keep my interest engaged…
My stock broker offers easy access at a reasonable cost to the following markets: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany. I pretty much copied the screen that Ed presented in his articles, spending quite a bit of time reading about the different factors on the Stockopedia site. I only had enough money for 7 stocks for the first round and decided to diversify as best I could on sector and market cap. The most daunting task was to make my choice between the stocks selected by the screens (one for each sector) and I tried to choose shares that looked to be in a positive trend. In the end I made my choice and bought 7 stocks end of July/beginning of August as listed below aiming for equal weighting (spending about the same amount on each stock).
I am very pleased with the results and I sold off my first SNAPS portfolio first week of January (keeping one stock to transfer to my second SNAPS portfolio) and thought it might be interesting to share my results on the forum.
I have indicated both the percentage change in stock price (the actual price I bought and sold at) and my relative gain/loss which includes transaction costs and takes into account exchange rates etc. As can be seen from the numbers I had quite a bit of help from the changing exchange rates over the period, but my next vacation will be more expensive so not really something I am too happy about…
| Company | Sector | Stock price change | My gain/loss |
| £ALV | Financials | 4.8% | 7.3% |
| £BMA | Consumer cyclicals | -14.9% | -15.9% |
| £EUZ | Healthcare | -1.3% | 1.9% |
| £FIA1S | Industrials | 57.0% | 62.1% |
| £KNOW | Technology | 28.5% | 29.8% |
| £SWA | Consumer defensives | 13.9% | 17.6% |
| £UPM | Basic materials | 9.2% | 12.9% |
In total my result was a gain of 17.1% including transaction costs and exchange rates. Including the dividend I received (before tax) from Schloss Wachenheim my total gain was 17.5%. Of course, if I take into account the cost of the Stockopedia subscription, the numbers will not look as good (but still positive).
I didn’t use stop loss, and spent a lot of time…
