Time for a review of my “5 shares for 2013?, that I chose slightly over a year ago. http://is.gd/iL4C3a

The ASXX (All-Share exc. Inv Companies) is up 17% over 1 year. A very happy performance. The performance of my 5 shares was not so happy, however. Here’s how they did:

  1. Idox (LON:IDOX) -39% . The shares caught a cold on the May trading update, and confidence throughout the rest of the year. Despite bullish prospects last year, it was not to be. I had selected it from Stockopedia’s CAN-SLIM strategy. It is a strategy that usually performs well. Just not this time.
  2. Lamprell (LON:LAM) +50%. Good performance from this turnaround, and I am anticipating good things from it next year
  3. Man (LON:EMG) +3%. This is a straight-forward value share. Unfortunately, the fortunes of the company are tied heavily to its AHL fund, which seems to have the nasty habit of wiping out months of profits accumulated carefully with sudden downturns.
  4. Albemarle & Bond Holdings (LON:ABM) -91%. Albermarle & Bond. A disasterous pick by me, which had the company melting gold to make ends meet. My comment that the “dividend looks safe” proved to be particularly laughable. ABM passed Stockopedia’s “Geraldine Weiss Lite Dividend Screen” *
  5. Avon Rubber (LON:AVON) +57%. Avon Rubber. This was a momentum share that kept going, and was selected from Stockopedia’s Richard Driehaus screen.

So, if you had chosen these shares for your 2013 portfolio, you’d be up 3% – well short of the index, and a very disappointing result.

If I had to offer a general observation, I’d say that I don’t like dividend shares. The upside tends to be limited, and the downside can be affected by too many “black swans”. We saw that in ABM’s case. going back, we can see this in companies like TSCO (Tesco), which dropped 20% in January 2012. Over 5 years, the shares are down 6%, compared with the Footsie up 60%.

Another observation I would make is to beware of “general” value shares. They’re a bit like dividend shares. Your upside is usually limited because the low PE ratio tends to reflect low growth expectations, and if…

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