SCSW v STOCKO

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9th Apr '22 by SCI20

21 comments 955 reads

I wonder if subscribers to the Small Company Share Watch can share their thoughts on how it compares to Stockopedia. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each? I post this not because I will be ending my subscription here but because I am considering adding SCSW. In particular I am hoping for greater information on resources, mining, basic materials and renewables which I find lacking in Stocko.

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SCI20

Premium Member

21 comments

Rusty2

9th Apr '22

I have considered SCSW, it has a good performance but is a tipping sheet, so tips are usually one sided. Also I don’t recall many resources, mining, basic materials and renewables stocks on there. Doubt you will get the tip price as shares are marked up as soon as known. I think you get far more in depth analysis on Stockopedia than SCSW. But for £150 it maybe worth trying. Not too keen on their latest tips, they send me emails all the time. I would not replace Stockopedia with SCSW, most of their tips are covered on here, the advantage is you may find them earlier. They cover a limited number of stocks.
Best way is to try it out.

SCI20

9th Apr '22

I don’t rely on other’s opinions but value them. I use the excellent Stockopedia tools for the majority of my investment decisions but I do feel greater discussion in the basic materials sector , a growth area, would be welcomed.

SCI20

9th Apr '22

Thanks Rustbucket that’s very helpful. I guess like many investors I am hunting for growth areas and the information that might support that.

WarrantStar

9th Apr '22

I subscribe to both. I find SCSW to be good at generating ideas for investments. But wherever I get an idea from, I always put it through my investment decision making process, which relies a lot on Stockopedia. In recent years I have been moving more towards the point of view that the best approach for me is to use my own Stockopedia screens. This has a number of advantages, including generating ideas before the crowd (or before the tip sheets). Also it helps me to find exactly what I am looking for, rather than relying on other people to present me with ideas that might not be that well aligned with my objectives.

Rusty2

9th Apr '22

If you look on the website you should be able to see all the past share tips and how they have performed, this does not include the more recent ones.

GloucesterBob

9th Apr '22

I subscribe to both (for now)

With SCSW (£12.50 a month) you get a 8 page magazine, many of the Stocks sound familiar to Stocko readers

With Stocko (£23 a month) you get 31 days of information.

There really is no comparison IMHO

SCI20

9th Apr '22

To be clear you advocate Stockopedia?

gmtrader

9th Apr '22

Personally I don’t like SCSW after having tried it. I would choose investor chronicles as it provides so much more with a good data base online to check out companies. Simon Thompson has picked out some good companies over the years but imo he has often got timing wrong, as so many do. What I do is look at all the buy recommendations then use charts to look for a good entry price which I then set an alert for with stockopedia. If an alert then gets triggered I do a more in-depth research.

GloucesterBob

9th Apr '22

Yes

KevinS1

9th Apr '22

I subscribe to SCSW & Stocko.

SCSW provides an 8-page tip-sheet once a month with normally three main tips and updates on the rest of their PF.

It loos like their history of picking winners is pretty good, but they are normally small/very small caps which depending on your own position may or may not be too high risk. Normally you also find that a lot of the ideas are also talked about on Stockopedia and are firm favourites of others.

I am getting close to my subscription renewal and cannot make my mind up yet as to whether I will renew. I feel that my PF has a broad selection of stocks and adding lots more small companies with smallish holdings (to balance the risk) would not work. However, I am currently rebalancing my PF to have a bigger base in a number of core IT's and will then have a smaller amount invested in smaller companies but potentially a wider base - so I might begin to look at some of their suggestions a bit more.

I guess it depends upon your objectives, attitude to risk and if you are happy to follow their tips - the in-depth research/details on each of the tips is very good and probably far deeper than I could easily do - they have normally spoken directly to the companies tipped.

If you are happy to invest £150pa in source material then its probably a reasonable investment, but there are a few very similar propositions out there. Like all investments time invested looks to be important with their latest (since 2015) PF seeming to be doing OK, but I notice none of the tips since Sept are not monitored.

AnonymousUser1822519

9th Apr '22

Whether its worth subscribing or not, why not give it a go. My criteria for subcription is whether the cost of paying for it annually is less than the net profits I make from using it. In stocko's case, that's amply true, and net profits will only increase with time as I learn more about Stocko.

AnonymousUser1822519

9th Apr '22

My subscription with IC runs out next month. I agree that its often best to wait months even for the price to settle before buying a ST tip, but because of the large audience of IC, if you get the timing right, the price can rally big. I'm still deciding whether to renew it or not. If I had to choose only one though, no contest, Stocko wins hands down for me. The problem I had with IC was that I was struggling to find enough good stocks to trade regularly. With Stocko's screens and mini charts that resolved that problem for me.

Devlishcunning

10th Apr '22

If you had started using SCSW at the beginning 1/11/94, and followed his portfolio, £25,000 would have become £19,000,000 by now. On a buy and hold basis, not as a trader, I can personally vouch for his latest portfolio starting Jan 2015 turning £100,000 into more than 3 times that amount over 7 years. Probably a waste of the £1,000 subscription money I have spent over that time. LOL.!

JohnEustace

10th Apr '22

I subscribe to both. I recommend SCSW but you won't find much on mining, basic materials or resources in it. You can download a sample copy at https://www.scsw.co.uk/samplec...

HHR

10th Apr '22

I have subscribed to SCSW for 20 years and it gets the highest recommendation from me.

I concur what Devlishcunning and JohnEustace have said – the performance of the portfolios is staggering – and there is little if any coverage of resource stocks.

In addition I would add the following :-

The portfolio’s performance is genuine because it only buys AFTER a share has been tipped
SCSW can not be accused of pumping microcaps. There are 24 stocks in the current portfolio - the average market cap is £700m, the smallest is £64m and only 3 are under £100m
Whilst it is true that MMs do temporarily mark up (or down for a sell) the prices of portfolio transactions immediately following publication, this doesn’t matter for two reasons i) the portfolio’s performance is so strong (20+ cagr) that the less competitive prices will only knock a few CAGR percent off subscriber performance e.g. he might make 400% on a tip and subscribers make 350%, ii) he holds the shares for the super long term (3 of the 24 were purchased in 2015, none have been purchased this year). This means the less competitive market prices subscribers get tend to ‘come out in the wash’ over the long term
I haven’t crunched the numbers but it is my impression that the stocks that get added to the portfolios do better than the standard tips that don’t get added

ken mitchell

10th Apr '22

Comparing SCSW with Stockopedia is comparing two SO different tools. There’s a wealth of information and facts and figures on Stockopedia whereas SCSW is a very good tip sheet with one sided coverage of their tips. Focus is often more on the story than fundamentals and bear case either brushed over or ignored.

The SCSW portfolio performance IS excellent but they can AND do hindsight invest as they are free to tell subscribers that they bought or sold at sometimes VERY convenient prices on any date between each publication.

Also they do occasionally buy a portfolio holding ahead of tipping it. E.g They had already bought Altitude at 24p ahead of a VERY rampy new main tip that saw an immediate 50% mark up and it went on to double in a few days ....and in the next edition they said they had sold part of the stake to run the rest for free. Despite that their Portfolio performance even if run as we have to run ours would be superb.

Their main tips are often marked up significantly before subscribers can buy. That reflects their success rate. Sometimes the prices fall back again to give a better chance to buy.

But ...Stockopedia OR SCSW? There’s SO much more on Stockopedia!

SCI20

12th Apr '22

Thank you everyone for their comments

KevinS1

12th Apr '22

As already stated I am a subscriber to SCSW. One thing that confuses me is the main tips (three each month) vs what makes it to the PF. There are no buys currently sat in the PF since around Sep last year (not got the copy near me to check), but with at least 6 newsletters since then we must've had 18 tips. What makes a tip a buy for the PF?

ken mitchell

13th Apr '22

KevinS1

There’s no criteria for what gets bought for the SCSW portfolio. The portfolio buys are obviously shares the Editor is particularly confident about. As with our portfolios, sometimes there’s little in cash for new buys. There is £60k in cash at present but it could well be that the Editor is wary of adding anything to the portfolio in present iffy markets.

Since the Editor is free to hindsight invest we might find there’s a new portfolio buy in the next edition, no doubt conveniently bought on a down day.

Also it’s a good idea for subscribers to note which of the tipped shares the Editor holds in his own portfolio. He is presumably more confident about those.

It must be fun for the Editor to be getting £199 a year for 12 issues knowing that shares he very strongly promotes are going to get marked up when he tips them, and that there is also likely to be a lot of buying from SCSW subscribers! Our own portfolio performance would be strongly enhanced if we were in his privileged position! BUT that can only be achieved where tips are consistently successful and they are for SCSW. Their sister publication Momentum Investor is far less successful and it’s not even worth considering subscribing to it imo.

Harry Hindsight

13th Apr '22

Looking at Simply WallSt which has an interesting graphical snapshot, like the StockRank and a good valuation bar against the market. Plus gives RNS for your portfolio rather than trawling through a list at 7am. Early days and happy with stock but clearly the SCVR has lost appeal recently due to macro environment. We still need the small cap space but at this time its defence commodities etc and forget retail which appears now rotted jam.

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SCSW v STOCKO

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SCI20

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