Stockopedia 2020 challenge - ENTER before midnight 31st December.
Hopefully I am not acting out of turn by posting this, but official communications on this subject seem to me to be somewhat sub-optimal.
Stockopedia are running and excellent share-picking competition for 2020 , with entries closing at midnight New Year's Eve.
Some may have seen the original blog-post on the subject about a week ago which was subsequently redacted. Others may have seen the more recent email from Ed advertising the competition. However I suspect there are some that don't read the emails and who may have missed the original blog-post (or not noted the link to the entry form when it was originally posted).
So in case you have missed it, let me sign post what looks like a really fun competition with a not insubstantial prize of a long weekend for two in New York. A particularly good prize I think for subscribers who do not actually live in New York - if you're an NY resident I'll wager there might be some scope for substitution should you win ;-).
The competition itself can be found here
It is of course entirely illogical of me to advertise a competition that I intend to enter (& if luck is with me, to win) to attract additional competitors. I guess we will just have to call this Christmas Spirit, or perhaps it is gratitude to the richly diverse community that populates the Stockopedia message boards. At the time of writing there are over 1,200 entries in the competition, but I think this is a small fraction of the subscriber base so hopefully we can improve on that number.
There is nothing to lose but your credibility - and I'll certainly be putting mine on the line with my 'ludicrous' potential selections.
Seasons greetings to one and all.
Regards,
Gromley
Disclaimer
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101 comments
If you have a positive % to date, you currently get into the top 50. As most picks have been adversely affected by Corona, after examination, I suspect the current leader may be a beneficiary.
2101 entries are currently suffering under the Bear.
How do I unpin this ? Might be fun to check up in 6 and 12 months.
There is a link near the top of this article but you can try this one: https://www.stockopedia.com/challenge/
Thanks herbie47
I signed up for it. Where do I find the current placings etc? Or indeed any information on it? Thanks
So ... my picks page shows a 1.6% gain ... but, if I go to the leaderboard and look at the 1.6'ers ... my 'folio name doesn't appear. To save endless searching ... would it not be possible to have your current rank shown on your portfolio page?
Thats a good suggestion, I think it shows the % at the last close, not sure when that is seems to be after midnight and before 8am. The current % is the latest share price, not sure if thats bid or last trade or what, probably 20 minute delay as well. The annoying thing with Stockopedia prices is it says up or down, even if the share price has not changed, because they are based on the last trade. My position at the moment seems correct.
Another suggestion is on the Top picks to have % gain or loss since inception of the competition and maybe the daily % gain/loss.
Omitting dividends from the returns makes this competition a bit of a nonsense in my view.
This opinions is definitely not affected by the fact that I currently find myself in 1,921st place.
I understand shares splits but I don’t understand this adjustment. In the competition which Ed says is correct GFRD is up about 3%, so this adjustment does not make any sense to me. My broker HL has a totally different adjustment but is more inline with the 3% gain. So in NAPS what is the gain?
The way the competition is treating the data, mirrors the real life situation (as Ed told us above they are using the fantasy funds engine to run the comp).
Competitors are showing the ~80% capital loss on GFRD based on the actual printed prices, but are holdig 0.57x VTY shares with a purchase price of zero.
The only minor issue with this approach is that the VTY positions are showing as 0% gain when looked at individually when in fact the gain is effectively infinite. This doesn't impact the overall portfolio result though as that is based on summing the absolute gains and losses.
Figures are still wrong: Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) is now showing -81.6%. No. 5 looks incorrect Renren was $2.49 on 31/12/19 and is now $1.96 (stockopedia figures), how is that +137%? One person has 6 shares in their selection. So still a few issues to sort out.
Ed addressed the Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) problem in the Q&A in yesterday's webinar at 47 minutes in. I couldn't fast forward to that on the events version but could on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtqLSXEePnQ
As for $renn https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/renn quotes a close on 31/12 of 2.49 and yesterday 1.96 giving a 21% drop. The competition appears to ignore a stock consolidation that took place on the 9th.
I suspect the competition was cobbled together in a rush without thought about dealing with corporate events. No dividends we are told but what if a company sells off a subsidiary and returns the cash as a special dividend? I can hear the cries of 'Unfair!' now.
Thanks for that, he says it's fixed and accurate but I'm not sure it is. I can't find Galliford Try on the top picks at all so I don't know how many people hold it. Does anyone know how much Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) has gone up? Stockopedia says 90.58p to 158.4p which is 67.82/90.58 = 74.87% divided by 5 = 15%, I would expect those folios to be much higher up the table, I think the highest one is at 183. Looking at that its seem the the GFRD contribution is only about 4%, ie 33% to 37% divide by 5 =7.4%
Here is an entrant that had GFRD:
https://www.stockopedia.com/challenge/entrant/776141/2020/
GFRD price has changed from 866 (Jan 2) to 158.40 -- but you were also allocated 0.5739521 Bovis (Vistry) shares.
So those with GFRD in their portfolio now have six shares but they are not equally weighted and the VTY shares represent pure profit -- effectively bought for 0 -- so hard to show the %-age change in a meaningful way.
So are you saying 4% gain is accurate?
But Stockopedia have revalued the shares from 90p to 158p, I presume this takes into account the Vistry (LON:VTY) shares. 144 to 158 is 10%.
On Jan-1st you have 1 x GFRD = 866
On Jan-11th you have 1 x GFRD + 0.574 x VTY = 158.4 + 1269*0.574 = 886.7
So you are about +2.4% on that stock so far I reckon. (No idea whether Stocko have computed the values of the portfolios correctly though.)
Don't you now have 6 Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) shares + 1/6 of 0.574 of 1 Vistry (LON:VTY) share for each share of GFRD you held on the 1st January? VTY share is now 1264/6 = 210.67 x 0.574 = 121p, so you have 158 + 121p = 279p. Or have I misunderstood this?
Nice one Nick - I was busy writing my epic ramble on the subject when you summed it up in 3 short points!!
We both came to the same basic conclusion - it just took me longer. ;-)
And Herbie - yes I think you have misunderstood (unless Nick & I have).
You had one "old" Galliford share, you now have one "new" Gallford share and 0.574 of a Vistry share.
I can't see where you are getting the x6 , /6 from?
Why are people making out the Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) shares have gone up so much? Stockopedia share price shows a 75% gain.
If the share price has fallen from 866p to 144p why is Stockopedia showing the share price as 90p before this sale? Some brokers are showing a drop from 866 to 144, which is 1/6. I can't see any other brokers showing figures the same as Stockopedia. HL are showing the price as around 156p, all very confusing.
" I can't find Galliford Try on the top picks at all ... "
I think the holding is classed as Vistry where there are 24 entries of which 22 subscribers.
Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD)
It is a curious one.
I believe that 17 people picked it, looking at just one
This shows the share price to be minus 81.6% which I think is technically correct.
The share price closed on 31-Dec at 859.50 and on 10-Jan at 158.40which indeed is -81.6%
(However for this entrant, & 1 other I looked at who also selected this stock, the overall portfolio performance reported is not consistent with the average of the individual stocks, so something is amiss in the aggregation anyway.)
But what is the "fair" outcome here?
For those (including me) confused by what is going one here.
Galliford disposed of a large part of their business to Bovis Homes (now known as Vistry Group plc) and shareholders received 0.573952 Bovis shares as a result of this transaction.
The StockReport now shows an "adjusted" closing price for Galliford shares on 31-Dec of 90.58p.
This I think implies a value for the Bovis/ Vistry (LON:VTY) shares of 1340p per share.
But would it be fair to use this adjusted historic share price as the basis for contestants who selected Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) . At face value, you would think yes, but actually what would that mean?
To achieve that result "in real life" holders of Galliford shares would have had to :
No body else in the competition is allowed to trade during the year, so why should Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) holders be allowed to.
The "adjusted" historic share price for Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) impliesn that each £1 invested in Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) became 10.5p invested in "new Galliford" and 89.5p invested in Vistry (ex Bovis). Maybe that would be the fairest outcome for contestants that chose Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) ?
So if on 31-Dec someone had £1,000 of GFRD that would be 116.3467 shares (based on the then share price of 859.5p.
Today they would have the same number of GFRD shares, but at a price of 158.4p now worth only £184.29, but also 66.77744 VTY shares, at a price of 1269p worth £847.41. So a total value of £1031.7 a gain of 3.17%
Isn't that the fairest basis?
I think it is harsh in the extreme of sharw to describe the competition as "cobbled together in a rush" but I do agree that a rational treatment of corporate events is necessary for fairness.
The rules allow for this and there are two key points :
In my view Total Shareholder Return [TSR] is the fundamentally fairest basis, but as this example indicates it is somewhat subject based on theoretical shareholder decisions.
The adjusted price as shown on the StockReport -implies that the shareholder immediately sold their VTY shares and bought back more Galliford shares at an effective price of 90.68p when in fact the absolute best price I think you could have bought at would be c. 130p and probably in reality closer to 160p (roughly where they are today).
It's certainly a puzzler and with no ill will towards those who chose Galliford I really hope it doesn't come anywhere near the leader board (on any basis) by the end of the year.
I chose Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) amongst my picks. I think that it's fair that we should accept that the corporate action resulted in also holding Vistry (LON:VTY) shares, with no room for choosing to trade in and out of stocks.
Therefore I would agree with Nick Ray on the calculation.
@sharw - re. "cobbled together in a rush" comment.
To be honest I do think that part of the comment is fair - but it's not to say "without thought about dealing with corporate actions". We did put it together quickly - but we handle corporate actions correctly. I don't think you will find any system that automates corporate actions on all 50,000 global stocks to the level you are wishing for. We don't receive all corporate action data - especially not for complex corporate actions like GFRD - but we do receive the vast majority of split and consolidation data. There is always a little manual intervention.
Yes the RENN issue needs sorted out. We haven't received the consolidation data yet in our system - but we will sort this out manually if we don't. To be honest, everyone should relax. You will see the odd valuation anomaly due to splits/consolidations, but we do pick them up. It might take a few days for us to sort them out, but they do get sorted out.
The GFRD calculations are correct. All picks were allocated an additional ~0.57 Vistry shares at the correct price. All the picks are backed by "Fantasy Funds". They use a nominal £1m and have a phantom number of shares purchased backing them.
Yes GFRD in the competition now look about right to me now I understand how it was allocated, what I don't understand is Stockopedia repricing of the shares prior to the sale to Vistry, why does it show about a 77% rise on the day, should it not show about 83% fall? Why are the shares around 90p and not 866p?
Herbie, it is actually quite common practise to rebase or adjust historic prices when there is a substantial capital event.
Most common is where there are share splits or share consolidations; if for example there is a 10 for 1 consolidation - the actual "printed" share price will go up 10 fold on the day it happens, but shareholders have gained nothing so an historic share price chart showing such an apparent leap would be total nonsense.
It is also though routinely done in the case of "spin offs" / "de-mergers". These are probably more common than my previous example would suggest. Back in 2001 BT span off O2 and as a result the printed share price fell, reflecting the fact that shareholder now owned shares in both BT Group & "MMO2" (as they were then). I can't recall the degree of the drop (could possibly find it in my archives as I was a shareholder at the time) - but you won't find the drop anywhere in "all time" charts, because the historic prices were adjusted.
So this was not a Stocko decision as such, but more a convention.
In fact I think you said somewhere that some of the sources you looked at were showing the original historic prices (I would imagine they will probably change) and some were showing the same figures as Stocko.
If the last part of that sentence is actually true - then it demonstrates that this was not a Stocko decision, but one from their data providers (Thompson-Reuters?). As the calculation performed thus far I believe is incorrect.
On 2-Jan-20 Galliford Shares closed at £8.86 but overnight each "old" Galliford share converted to 1 "new" Galliford share and 0.574.... VTY (ex-bovis) shares.
Bovis had closed at 1330 meaning shareholders received c. £7.63 of VTY share, meaning the rump of Galliford was worth a notional c. £1.23.
I thought I had worked out where the adjusted 2-jan close of 93.37p quoted by Stocko came from, but I realise that was just circular maths. Unless I am missing something it is just wrong,
Somewhat tangential to the competition itself, but continuing the view on the adjusted historical prices for Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) used by Stockopedia (and others, Bloomberg for example), I said :
Well, I WAS missing something, so I now understand the adjusted figure and it is not "just wrong" although as I will explain I don't agree that it is wholly correct either .
As noted above I used a 2-Jan closing price for Vistry (LON:VTY) of 1330p (from the stock report) meaning that the "rump" of a GFRD share having received 0.574.... VTY shares was deemed to be worth
= 886 - 0.574 * 1330 = 123p
Whereas the Stocko figures using 1381 give
886 - 0.574 * 1381 = 93p
Until checking back to my own data, I hadn’t realised that the actual 2-Jan close for VTY was 1381 hence my original puzzlement.
So the VTY price history has been adjusted too. Why?
Because , there was an issue of “bonus shares” to existing shareholders in lieu of a special dividend that was due to be paid. The bonus shares also effectively transacted over-night 2nd/3rd Jan.
The adjustment from 1381 (actual close) to 1330 adjusted simply reflects the dilution of issuing the bonus shares for “free”. Looked at another way you can say that 1381 reflects the cum-rights price and 1330 the ex-rights price.
At the very least I would say this sequence of events is extremely unusual - perhaps even unprecedented (?) so issues about correct adjustments probably should not be that surprising.
So which figure is “correct”?
Conventionally you would make an adjustment for an event based on the actual closing price immediately before the event. This is what Stocko and others have done, so it looks correct.
However, although the issue of the bonus shares to existing holders and the acquisition shares to GFRD shareholders effectively happened simultaneously, there is actually a precedence.
Effectively the bonus shares were issued before the acquisition shares, or put another way the 0.574.. x shares received by GFRD were “ex-rights” so “worth” 1330 and not 1381.
So personally I am still of the view that the idea that GFRD are up from 93p to 157p since before the disposal is misleading and that 123p to 157p is nearer to the mark. In fact even my lower 28% dramatically overstates the real life impact.
Owners of GFRD on the 2nd of Jan had a value of 886p per share
They now have GFRD at 157.7p plus 0.574 VTY shares worth 737.6p for a total of 895.3p (a 1% gain)
It is “interesting”(*) to look at what has actually happened
[* Other definitions of “interesting” are available.]
Here is a comparison of performance of the Adjusted GFRD share price (using my view of the 2nd Jan position) [the blue line] and the “real money” position of owning 0.574 Vistry (LON:VTY) shares per Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) share post completion [the stacked area chart].
The “adjusted share-price” (even on my calculation) paints a more positive picture than the reality experienced by Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) shareholders.
Aside from a small wobble, the gap occurred at the time of the transaction itself, so there was no real opportunity to avoid this by selling the Vistry (LON:VTY) shares and reinvesting in Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) .
The following might be total nonsense, but
I’m trying to understand what this "means" (possibly nothing).
The 3rd Jan closing price for GFRD of 165.86p compared with 886p on 2nd Jan and the implied adjust GFRD price for 2-Jan implies (I think) that the market is judging that GFRD received c. 5% more for the business disposed of than it was worth. In reality GFRD shareholders have not benefited from this so far because their payment was in shares of the company that "overpaid".
With hindsight this should probably not be a surprise. Unless buying distressed assets, acquirers always overpay vs. the stand-alone value of the business acquired. This does not necessarily make it a ‘bad’ acquisition – the real question is how the amount “paid” for the acquisition compares with the value added to the business post integration and synergies.
It will be interesting [* same caveat applies) to see how this pans out through the year.
I actually have little interest in either share at the moment, so may well forget; but if there is anyone that had the stamina to make it this far through the post that would like to see the comparison revisited – please feel free to prompt me a quarter (or even month) ends.
Ed told me that he “hadn’t been as deep in the weeds on this situation as I had” – I think I have gone way beyond the weeds, to the extent that I now have no idea which continent I’m on – given the above paragraph I have to conclude that I have invented an entirely new OCD-niche.
Thank you and good night.
Gromley -
Well done for producing such a comprehensive dissertation on the Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) situation.
At least it wasn't made even worse by a share consolidation. I have held Whitbread (LON:WTB) through many disposals including pubs and David Lloyd Leisure and each time there was a return to shareholders and shares were adjusted to make graphs look continuous. My shares, which started with a standard nominal value now have one of 76 and 122/153 rds p. At the end of the day it makes no difference to me - I do a simple "total return" a/c based on bid price x number of shares minus broker's fee plus dividends minus purchase price. Only when it is a competition do we get so excited about % to be used as a comparison.
On which subject, the leaders for the first week had all chosen Lekoil (LON:LEK) . Now you could not make this up: on the 2nd the company announced a funding deal causing the massive rise in share price. Today, following a brief suspension, it announced:
"....the loan agreement announced on 2 January 2020 by the Company, purportedly with the Qatar Investment Authority ("QIA") (the "Facility Agreement" or the "Transaction") seems to have been entered into by the Company with individuals who have constructed a complex facade in order to masquerade as representatives of the QIA (the "Counterparties")."
see https://www.stockopedia.com/sh...
Can you imagine the outcry if the first announcement had been made just before the end of the competition and the second after the announcement of the winner, who had include this share!
I have discovered that entries are updated in the evening regarding share price but overnight regarding position so 5th place allen Walkey' is shown as --0.8% year to date (+30.1% as of the last close) because Lekoil is now -46.2%.
So what is now propping up the leaders?
https://www.stockopedia.com/sh... up 142.4%
https://www.stockopedia.com/sh... up 160.9%
and our old friend $RENN which Ed acknowledged was wrong - corrected on stock report but not here.
I have lost the will to investigate Hcell and Trillium - will leave that to someone else.
Ed - thanks for your reply. Apologies for the harshness of the comment and I appreciate that corporate actions come in many forms, GFRD and RENN showing two different types.
Re RENN I see that the chart on the Stock Report page is now in line with the NASDAQ one that I linked to showing a close on 31/12 of $2.49.
Gromley-
-0.1+2.8-15.4+31.4+3.3 = 22.0 22/5 = 4.4
Looks right to me
{sigh}
I sometimes think my stunning wit is wasted here. Thanks for checking anyway though.
Where do we get the report mentioned in Webinair?
Copied from purpleski on Friday's SCVR:
(Replay) available at
https://events.genndi.com/replay/169105139238459639/b8409147e4/0/0
Top Picks at https://www.stockopedia.com/challenge/top-picks/
Slides at http://assets.stockopedia.com/webinars/2020-stock-picks-webinar-slides.pdf
Full report at https://assets.stockopedia.com/webinars/topstocks2020.pdf
Where can I access my performance on the 2020 challenge?
Either link in this article or try here: https://www.stockopedia.com/challenge/
There seem to be 4181 entrants on the leaderboard today. It was 2153 yesterday. Not sure what's happened there!
We ran some admin on the database - the valuation anomalies that had been reported should be flushed through tomorrow. There were briefly some duplicates on the portal as the database scripts ran.
There's going to be a great new feature added to the challenge website at the weekend. So stay tuned.
If you want early access join the webinar on Friday here - https://why.stockopedia.com/investmentideas/
Still looks incorrect. The zero ones have been sorted but No. 3 looks wrong and I'm not convinced Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) is correct.
There is also an issue with the performance stats on my portfolio.
The three selections I actually own are shown as being down by an average 3%, whereas the 2 still on my watchlist are up an average 15%.
Gotta be a data glitch.
<fingers in ears>La La La - I can't hear any answers to this post </fingers>
My first steps have all been backwards.
Whoopee! I'm 7th currently and that is without the aid of Oilers (I see you Lekoil (LON:LEK) ). Somewhat bemused to read that I may fail some mysteriously revisionism on competition rules as I believe that Tasty (LON:TAST) might be controversial as its sub £10m market cap (but is a real business with c.£50m revenue!). I also wonder whether Pampa Energia which I have through its US ADR but is an Argentine stock may be used against me (that would be harsh too as its direct transpose of the Argentine stock but better access and liquidity through US listing).
Anyway, I'm not worried much as I wont win but the ex-post revision does ruin my sense of fun re the competition.
The winner will have oilers, miners, bio and spec tech that hits home runs...probably 3 or 4 of them. I just don't get that speculative in those areas so I would be blind....however, the competition is clearly a 'speculation' competition rather than an 'investment' one so I did seek spec juice and put in a few rather binary type stocks (with an eye to avoiding downside wipeout).
How the compeition could be treated any other way is beyond me....and now you've started the game you should stick to the original rules. Obvs if moralising/education is needed you can show the fat tail of speculative failures relative to the skinny upper reaches of speculative winners.
Ciao for now
I am reminded that a thousand mile walk (365 Day competition) starts with the first step
Ones with Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) are showing a minus figure even though the shares were up 80%.
If you held five equal-weighted stocks including Galliford Try Holdings (LON:GFRD) at the start of the competition, you now hold six stocks and they are no longer equal-weighted. (You have 0.5739521 Vistry (LON:VTY) as well).
Could mean a bit of hasty recoding is needed behind the scenes!
Haha - yes indeed. It's definitely an MVP and needs a lot of improvements! We just wanted to have some Christmas & New Year fun and thought we'd throw a prize into the mix.
It's actually quite amazing the insights that have been generated from the picks. I think I'm going to do a webinar this week and do some reveals.
Congratulations all, hope one of you does well.
I'm afraid I'm a very boring investor.
I looked at the rules, considered what types of share might enable me to win, thought about whether I wanted to spend any of my time at all looking those them, then decided not to enter.
The Rules and the Learning
There seems to be general agreement that the winning strategy in response to rules as initially laid out is to pick 5 binary punt type stocks.
There also seems to be consensus that the winner will likely have followed something like that strategy.
I haven't really looked through the entries at this stage (hoping that Stockopedia will provide something along those lines - eg a single web page with a row per entrant and the names of the 5 entries in columns - I know I could write some code to "data-scrape" that fairly easily, but as priorities go that is pretty low down). I would guess though that at least some entrants have gone for more real life portfolios.
Assuming that those are in the minority what can we expect to see in the final results and what might the learnings be?
1. The winner is likely to have chosen a bunch of story stocks
That is a slightly troubling narrative, for two reasons.
2. There will be a small proportion of entrants with outstanding returns, a possibly even smaller proportion with modestly good to modestly bad returns and a large proportion with substantial under-achievement or even total loses.
This might be a somewhat troublesome outcome in that it could imply that Stocko subscribers or those who might be interested in becoming such are on the whole really poor investors. We know this not to be the case in fact, however I can imagine some less scrupulous alleged-competitors to Stockopedia attempting to peddle that line (I suspect many readers would have a good idea who I have in mind!)
3. Anyone "gaming" the rules - has shown their level of insight.
Ed has very loosely inferred that with the benefit of hindsight the competition does not actually meet the original intention and that even some post-event tweaking to the winning criteria might be in order.
That however I think would be a big mistake - potential reputational damage from "fixing a competition" (I would not chose those words, but I can imagine some would) would not be good.
What this competition offers up however is potentially an excellent insight into risk management and economic incentives.
If a significant proportion of entrants have "gamed" the competition rules; then that just proves what an astute bunch we all are. Those "gamers" have quickly understood the risk vs reward and the economic benefit of the "transaction".
If you are reading that and thinking to yourself - that's obvious! (There is only one prize (excepting the unspecified quarterly prizes) and no cost of entry.) Congratulations - I don't have any hard data to back it up, but I suspect that makes you smarter than the average bear.
4. ON AVERAGE (more particularly on median) - portfolios "gaming" the rules will (significantly) underperform more rational strategies.
That, imho, assuming it comes to pass - that is really valuable confirmation and potentially a really valuable marketing tool.
If at the end of the year one compares the average/median performance of all entrant-portfolios (or all "gaming" portfolios) against, say, NAPS or SR-90+. I think that would be a really useful illustration.
So whilst, I sense (rightly or wrongly) that Ed is worrying that the competition was in hindsight poorly designed; I actually think it potentially provides a very rich source of potential learning.
5. A final quick aside.
There have been a few thoughts in the comments so far on how to run a competition like this and take out the likelihood that the winner will have be just lucky. I don;t personally believe that any of those alternatives I have read actually achieve that.
However, here is an alternative "shoot from the hip" thought that occurred to me whilst writing this.
Suppose entrants had to pick four different 5 stock portfolios(with no repeated stocks), with the highest performing 5-stock portfolio taking the prize, but only if at least 2 of those mini-folios beat the benchmark (eg NAPS). Whilst there is an element of chance, I think the winner under those rules would be much more likely to be "deserving".
Personally I just like the competition as a bit of fun and a chance fora bit of learning.
I'll enjoy the trip to NY too of course ;-)
To be quite honest Gromley, I think the most quintessentially Stockopedic aspect of this competition is that rather than just enter the blooming thing, the community have not only analysed and summarised various strategies that might be applied to this competition, but they have also volunteered multiple redesigns for improved versions of the competition --- and it's still only day 3! :-)
hehe - Quite so Nick!
The Leaderboard is not very user friendly. I can't find my position other than by traversing through many pages worth of entries. Also it would be better if the stock tickers for the five entries were displayed alongside the entry name rather than having to click View Picks for each entry of interest.
To see how it should be done take a look at the Stockchallenge website.
Hi Henry - yes we'll be adding in more search options in due course. We put this together in a few days before Christmas.
Regarding the calculation errors reported - this was due to quite a few microcaps not having close prices on the last day of the year. That's been rectified now.
So today the the top two on the leaderboard are clearly incorrect, and the people who are currently on exactly 0 % are at the bottom, not in the middle. Still some work to do!
As I pointed out in post 46 there appears to be a major glitch if shares traded on overseas exchanges are included and that applies to the top two.
I think the 0% entrants at the bottom of the leaderboard are there because their performance has been computed as N/A (some problem with the data) but Stocko has printed the N/A as 0%.
There are clearly some bugs to iron out still. After 2 trading days my picks (all fairly speculative resource stocks) are up 6.6% but I'm not on the leaderboard. And yes, the winner is I think very likely to be someone for whom one or two of their gambles paid off handsomely - but I'm sure the Stockopedia team will get lots of useful information from the results - in particular the correlation between the stock ranks and return averages. Hopefully there'll be a positive correlation!
It would appear that whereas individual entries have been updated the leaderboard has remained with the positions shown after one day's trade. So in your own case (grb) your graph shows 1,56% for day one and 6.38% for day 2 but you are shown on the table as 1,6%. However, although that is inline with your individual shares the anomaly with others persist as with the two I mentioned in post 39 - PBart at 1st and Will Parry at 6th. I notice that both of these include shares from overseas exchanges so perhaps it is something to do with that.
I’m already regretting my choices. To win this competition outright means finding spectacular winners, and I opted to gamble on that with lower quality picks. If Ed was hoping many of us would have opted for high ranking shares, perhaps another year, if it is decided to give it another try, a prize or 2 for the best performing portfolios with average overall of 90+ could work well?
Wish now I had forgotten about the first prize, where chance of winning is worse than 2000-1 and just gone for 5 good quality picks that I also hold. Far more satisfying this time next year if those 5 do well than seeing 5 gambles flop!
Why has the leaderboard not been updated yet, it is still showing Thursday’s prices. Also it says everyone has 0% returns on their folio. Lekoil (LON:LEK) is up over 100% already. Will this be like the tortoise and hare race?
I expect initially to see the upper quartile of the leader board to be populated with low stock ranks as the "chance" high volatility and speculative picks make a disproportionate impact.
What will be interesting will be to see how the proportion of green stock ranks in that top quartile changes as the year progresses.
So, day 1 accounted for and most of the leaders selected Lekoil (LON:LEK) up 57%. However, some do not appear to tally - the first spot goes to PBart up 67p on a notional £5 entry with second Philip Murray up 93p. Then in 6th place we have Will Parry up 3p. Selection tables do not match claimed overall % even allowing for rounding.
Hi sharw, yes I agree the scores are a little odd.
I went to the very last page, showing the worst-performing entries. There are 2,153 entries in all which is very impressive. The worst performer so far is down 7.2% which is this entry and the five selections are shown as having achieved 0, 0, -3, -4, -5 so logically that cannot average -7.2 even if there is a problem with the weighting.
After that you have six entries at 0% change, so there is presumably a coding error that puts these at the end of the list instead of where they belong, between the positive and negative returns. Here is an example and in this case the changes are -1, -1, 0, +1 and +6 so again there is no way that this equals zero. It should be +1% on average.
There is a final bug which is that when you look at any individual entry it always says
regardless of the stated performance...
I don't mean to appear ungrateful, it's a fun competition and I'm sure these can be fixed. It's always easier when you have real numbers to work with, rather than a string of zeros.
I agree the percentage rises do not seem to add up, how does +1%, +2%, 0, -1% and 0 = 10.7%
This competition seems to be encouraging highly speculation investing.
Some of prices have been updated but the leaderboard has not changed.
Unbelievable! I put in a cracking 10% first day performance and then Stockopedia state they’re going to hindsight billionaire change the rules! Tasty (LON:TAST) was my big mover...surely market cap would be unfair as £45m revenue and a conservative special sits play as it works back towards a price to sales ratio of at least 0.75 ;)
Well done mojo - not sure if anyone else picked Tasty (LON:TAST) , but it could be you are the leader on the road?
To be fair, Ed was speculating on a rule change, but I think it will actually be hard to justify any disqualifications (although we have to accept the judges decision is final - and at least you'd get your entry fee back!). The beauty of the prize structure though is that, were you to be disqualified as winner, there would be one person incensed by the decision, one person firmly supportive of it, and 2000-odd people totally indifferent.
I do kind of understand Ed's concern of not wanting to promote exactly the wrong kind of investing, but many of us chose or selections in the context of the rules as stated, which would make a sea-change somewhat awkard.
I personally like the rules as they are (although I would have been happy with alternatives - but not automatically excluding micro-caps.
On the other hand I have a vision of Ed thinking : "This seemed like such a good idea when it came up at the Christmas Party!!!"
Actually I think a lot of people will be annoyed if they start to change the rules after the competition has commenced. I bet Ed hopes it will be won by someone with high ranking SR scores.
If you had set a minimum market cap up front that would have been all well and good, but if you attempted to apply that in retrospect, surely that would be you gaming the outcome?
I have 1 (might be 2 -I'd have to check) with < £10m market cap in my selection and whilst one is by my own admission something of a wildcard, I own it and can (& will) justify the investment hypothesis; the other I would argue would not be outside of many investors risk tolerances (I cannot remember from the MelloBash whether you ended up agreeing or not ?)
Anyway I don't want to get too over-excited about this (unless I were disqualified with an otherwise winning return!) I would just say that, given the rules were pretty much black & white you ought to be cautious about materially changing them or invoking the "gaming" clause.
An additional "risk-adjusted return" prize, however would be a great idea and would perhaps get you closer to the Stocko ethos.
As has been pointed out by several posters this competition has polarised entrants between those with 5 decent shares that they would buy in real life and those with 5 microcap shares (probably holes in the ground or pharma).
The reasoning for the latter is that If you had picked Petrel Resources (LON:PET) a year ago and your other 4 had gone into liquidation you would still have beaten someone whose 5 shares had each gone up by 100%. Here's a random illustration of the two types:
https://www.stockopedia.com/challenge/entrant/236123/2020/
https://www.stockopedia.com/challenge/entrant/776536/2020/
(and for the record my 5 are ones that I own - I don't want a weekend in NY - I just want to prove I can beat the index).
When will the prices be updated, is it the end of the day? I thought they would similar to the fantasy funds but no movement yet.
I think the competition will do the job of showing how well factors work just fine.
The Stocko team can pull out a load of stats which will show the high QVM portfolios consistently performing well.
The fact that the competition will probably be won by the portfolio which happens to include some crazy outlier with a starting Mkt Cap of £1M which ten-bagged by sheer luck in the last week of December will not dull the overall message about factors. The majority of highly speculative portfolios will crash and burn and the majority of high factor portfolios will turn in a respectable performance (even if they do not win.)
However as a participant in the competition the maths suggests that you won't win with a factor based portfolio. We don't know which one or two stocks will have a massive out-performance (greater than three sigma from mean) this year, but we can estimate that with over 2000 entries at least one portfolio will most likely contain a ">3s" stock. So in order to have a reasonable probability of winning the competition (as opposed to having a reasonable probability of above median performance which is the usual case) you need to fish in the sea where the outliers live!
With hindsight we should have put a £10m market cap minimum on the competition. Nonetheless - the judges verdict is final and we may take the view that some portfolios aren't playing fair. We shall see. I'm quite keen to have the best risk-adjusted return prize too.
I took a quick approach to this with no actual research on any of the chosen stocks. Did a screen for five currently non profitable stocks, with mcap <£250m, and ranked them on topline revenue increase YoY taking the top 5. Oh and sp had to be higher vs a year ago. Ended up with four sucker stocks and a momentum trap :D almost the complete opposite of my actual investing strategy.
Personally I think what Stockopedia are trying to achieve is to grow their email marketing list and offer potential customers a bit of a discount. :-)
The competition is obviously 99% chance and 1% skill (if that). But it's free to enter and gave me ten minutes of amusement after Christmas sifting though a gallery of rogues and villains trying to spot rough diamonds.
I am probably reiterating other comments, but for me this is purely a competition where I can take a punt on stocks which I wouldn’t (bar one selection) invest in real life.
To win with just 5 stocks over a defined period of just a year will probably require some considerable luck, hence my selections made on that speculative basis. I am just as likely to finish last as first.
I think that just over 2000 people have entered and it would appear that there are a considerable number of non-subscribers. I would guess that this will make the selections quite diverse with possibly more resource stocks than expected.
I am not really that interested in going to New York, but in the extremely unlikely event of winning, would like to donate them to a local Hospice which has regular prize draws and would value them as the generous prizes that they are. Obviously subject to Stockopedia agreement.
Reminder
Have entered.
Disclosure: Due to different rules and objectives, none of my 5 picks are in the real money portfolio or even on the watch list.
Yes it will be interesting to see the spread of stocks picked across the competition - as you allude to with the reward for finishing mid table (or even in second place) be the same as that for finishing last; it does create a different dynamic for portfolio selection than most people would deploy with real money.
Barring any wild movements in the last hour of trading today, my folio will consist of 5 stocks each of which have a plausible case to at least double over the next 12 months (one of them I would argue could feasibly 10 bag).
I don't consider myself a particularly adventurous investor, so it is a bit of a paradox that I have a small real money position in three of my picks, with the other two on my watchlist - and it is only my recent greater emphasis on momentum that has so far prevented me from buying.
In my defence, I would argue that four of my picks actually have relatively decent downside protection, the other could easily be a zero, but I remain hopeful of a positive outcome.
We shall see.
Thanks for this Gromley, a good reminder for a fun comp.
Disclaimer, I don't think my selection have a cat in hells chance!!
As the comp. entry deadline has now passed Gromley, perhaps you could tell us (me) which one you think has a chance of 10x bagging??? I would be interested to check that out :-)
Happy new year to all, and good luck in the winner takes all comp.
More than happy to reveal mark, although I should stress that my feasible '10 bagger' has a much higher probability of being a 'zero'.
It is Toople (LON:TOOP) - I plan to write more on them here &/or at cube.investments once their results (promised by the end of Jan) are released. (Even if the results disappoint, I will at that point explain what I was hoping for)
For now I will just say, that it is not an entirely random punt. I think I have a bit of an edge, not because I used to work in the industry, but because I am the kind of nerd that will spend extracting hard data out of public pronouncements, with the ability to model them in detail. Basically, whilst I accept they deserve to be 'long odds' I think the current share-price is at odds with the probability.
Those who attended the November Stockslam (@ Mello) will have some insight into why I consider them investable; although to be fair, by the time I finished explaining all of the reasons to avoid them I only had about 40 seconds of my allotted 3 minutes left!
Anyway, I am not the only idiot to have picked them; I persuaded my dearly beloved to enter the competition too and she understood the merits (in the context of this competition). I think however she would have chopped my hands off had I suggested she deploy part of her ISA in the company. Smart woman!
Disclosure - I do actually have a small position in Toople (LON:TOOP) .
That set me thinking though, although I thought I had picked a "way out there" portfolio, I am now not so sure. My idea of diversification these days is 25-30 stocks long and the same number short (so, close to "market neutral" - although I am tempted to tweak that to the bullish side currently); so a 5 stock Long portfolio should be pretty scary.
Actually, however, I am minded to think that 'on balance of probabilities', my portfolio should deliver positive returns over the year, albeit quite modest. I feel quite confident, that at least one of my picks will double over the year and if one fails totally (probably Toople!) then a small net positive from the other three would keep the portfolio above water.
That's one of those predictions that might prove embarrassing in the future, but I'll come back and review it at the year end.
FWIW, the full list of my selections consists of Connect (LON:CNCT) , Filtronic (LON:FTC) , Innovaderma (LON:IDP) , McColl's Retail (LON:MCLS) , Toople (LON:TOOP) .
I do not currently hold Connect (LON:CNCT) & McColl's Retail (LON:MCLS) .
It would be great to read the rationale - if there is one ;-) - for other contestants entries.
This is the screen I used: https://www.stockopedia.com/sc...
I don't even know what my picks do and I'm banking on surprise events. I did note that they were listed in either Norway or Poland and had a high average stockrank in the mid 70's.
The screen today has one company +35% in the week. No idea if I picked it. I'll have to look it up now :-)
They are:
That's a relief no large moves yet - I want the volatility after the start date!
Thanks Gromley. Yes, interesting pick Toople. I'll keep my eye on them (up today already :-) )
My selection is Ab Dynamics (LON:ABDP) Dart (LON:DTG) Future (LON:FUTR) Judges Scientific (LON:JDG) and Learning Technologies (LON:LTG)
I don't know if this is unusual for this comp., but I hold most of them (not currently AB Dynamics, as my stop was triggered in December). I have a small separate account where I invest/trade risky (er) stock, separate from my buy and holds and my funds and these are in that.
I will provide some sort of rationale, over the next few days when I get time, as it seems some others, like me, are interested in the selection process of other investors.
In terms of the premise of the comp. itelf. my view for what it's worth, is that it needed to be simple, it needed to be realatively short (to keep people intersted) and it needed to be fun.
I agree with PhilH that an additon, more serious comp. would be great too (allowing buy and sells), akin to a Stocko members version of the US Investing Championsips. Not over 10 years though, but perhaps over a 1 yr rolling basis (to allow new entrants).
Anyway this one should be fun.
I have been fascinated by this thread you have created and thank you for starting the whole debate about the competition. There is somewhat of a similarity that I have with the fact that you do own some stocks from your picks. For my part, I had been creating a portfolio to take into the new year start and have built my real world positions in my chosen 5 stocks for January. Whilst the competition spans a year, my holding periods do tend to be much longer so am more in it to monitor my real world holdings for this year and beyond. AS I had bought into my last positions in December and now have the required shares in each holding, it will be interesting to see how they do especially after watching the presentation by Ed this week around the overall competition. Good luck to all.
No, there are no links on the website - the only links are those sent out in the general email yesterday (26/12) which is sent to all subscribers and non-subscribers for whom Stocko has an email address. If you did not get that try clicking here:
https://www.stockopedia.com/challenge/
still cannot find the contest on the website suggests the contest is nothing more than marketing gimmick pity there were some interesting picks
As it is a free to enter comp, with a pretty decent prize, I don't mind if Stocko try to get some marketing leverage out of it.
Does anyone know how to find the 2020 Stock picking competition on this website? I entered it this morning and now it has completely vanished. Alan
BLACKGLOVE,
Try the link in my original post also replicated here, hopefully it works.
The competition itself can be found here
I started my post at the top of this thread with
I think I can now, maybe, understand this from some of the comments above , but before publicly speculating too much I'll check back with the de management.
In the meantime, hopefully the blue link above takes you to the competition.
just type www.stockopedia.com/challenge
Laughton - no - I am on the old site but got a wiggle as there is only one entry form. To double check I started an entry form on a browser where I was not logged in and before I got to the entry page (which I did not complete since only one entry each) I received an email offering a 14 day free trial of Stocko.
sharw - I think the absence of the "Stocko wiggle" is more to do with those that prefer the "old" site rather than the "new". Those accessing via the new site get a wiggle, those via the old site don't.
"At the time of writing there are over 1,200 entries in the competition, but I think this is a small fraction of the subscriber base so hopefully we can improve on that number".
An even smaller fraction actually as this is open to all as a marketing exercise - 61 of the 100 most recent entries are not subscribers (those of us who are have the Stocko wiggle by our names).
Here is the now deleted thread - the comments remain with some discussion on the rules including treatment of dividends:
https://www.stockopedia.com/co...
I thought the "wiggle" was just new system users?
Good fun, the only thing to bother me is there's no accounting of Spread. I'm looking at Nick Ray's screen which indicates to me the class of share most likely to win the competition.
Hi all,
As Gromley says, a great idea !
Now, could Some Kind Person at S'pedia generate a ranking list of picks, once the deadline has passed , please ?
On a 'wisdom of crowds' basis, it would be interesting to see which co's emerged as favourites !
Season's greetings and ATB
I will of course be doing so - lots of good info to come.
If anyone wonders what kind of stocks had the very highest (greater than 3 sigma) price performance over the last year, a simple screen reveals all.
Obviously the Stock Rank and Risk Rating are based on the end-of-year value, but I think the story is clear enough.
Happy Hunting!
Thank you Nick, that is a really interesting screen that illustrates the peculiar dynamics of a competition where there is no downside and no account taken of risk, only performance. The rational choice is to select highly speculative stocks, even if in practice you wouldn't buy that basket of five stocks for your own portfolio.
At risk of stating the obvious, the StockRank style of 'Momentum Trap' is a consequence not a cause of the outperformance. When you look at the most successful examples, the price was typically flatlining at a few pence, often with successive placings to keep the lights on, until - boom! An unexpected bit of news, or several, puts a rocket under the price. I haven't looked at all of them, but those I have were without exception 'sucker stocks' at the start of 2019. They will now be Momentum Traps until either the results catch up with expectations or the hope turn out to be unfounded and the price declines again.
Incidentally, the Chairman's statement from Petrel Resources in June 2019 is well worth reading as an example of clear communications and the pressures faced by junior resource stocks. I love his honesty and wish more RNS announcements were like this.
Wishing everyone a happy and successful 2020.
Hi Nick,
Interesting data, but this isn't pick a stock, it's pick a portfolio of five.
What is the typical performance of a basket of five Highly Speculative stocks?
It'll be interesting to see the results this time next year.
Happy New Year\
Phil
True Phil, but with over 2000 entrants, the winner will probably come from the lucky entrant (or most enlightened :-) ) whose 5 speculative stocks happen to have a great year (rathar than a lower risk selection). Will be fun to watch.
Well I think the result will most likely be 1 stellar performer and 4 others that don't implode.
Unfortuantely it doesn't really promote best practice for the long term. The vast majority of highly specualtive entries will crash n burn.
So if I'm a new investor attracted to the site as a result of the competition I might be drawn into thinking that 'winning' means hitting the jackpot with one share.
For the 'winner' they try the same next year and lose all of their winnings and any further funds they add.
For the other newbies whose portfolios implode they might well come away with the message that investing is a mug's game.
So standing back a little ... What are we all trying to achieve?
Investors - grow portfolios over the long term
Stockopedia - promote the use research based investment approaches for everyman. Grow their business as a result.
Brokers - increase profile of investment. Earn commission.
Sponsor - promotion to A+++ client base
So as well as a 1 year 'hot shot' prize, what if there was a 10 year competition?
How about £30K cold hard cash prize to the ten year winner?
Investors win - They strive to build a long term sustainable investing approach
Stockopedia win - They attract hoardes looking to win £30k . The data collection alone could be invaluable. Ideally the results demonstrate that the Stockopedia model works, for example that a NAPS approach can achieve respectable returns with little effort. It becomes a virteous circle.
Brokers win - More investors in the market = more commission
Sponsor wins - Exposure to cash rich market = increased revenue & profile
I believe that the 'hot shot' and 'long term' competitions would demonstrate that ...
- the 'hot shot' winner of 2020 would be unlikely to feature in the top 10% of future 'hot shot' competitions over a ten year period
- the consoldidated winnings (of all ten years) of any 'hot shot' winners from any year 2020 - 2030 would under perform the winner of the 10 year comp using a methodical approach
For me the best advertising for Stockopedia was the fantasy funds as they demonstrated over the long term how investors could build an approach. Telling someone that you can achieve an annualised return of 18% over 6 years + is one thing, showing them (including the purchases) is quite another.
Best of luck
Phil
Agree with Phil H
There are 2 ways of reducing the chance a 'lottery ticket' picker wins
1 - make the competition shorter
2 - increase the number of stocks you must choose
Yes but you only need one to multibag, you can go for a more Naps type selection but I doubt that will be the winner. Naps has not done so well in the last 2 years, no doubt there will be an update in the next few days. Will be interesting to see the winners, I fear my selection has not been speculative enough.
Can we follow, using the entry portal how everyone is going, month on month, otherwise its going to be a long rather boring wait! oops sorry, I see you can, cool!