Back in early 2020 - just a few weeks before Covid turned the world upside down - we started a Staff Investment Club here at Stockopedia. It was an ideal way of getting the whole team into the mindset of investors, and making some money to boot.
For two and a half years we had some terrific highs and a few sobering lows. But this week we’re closing the first chapter on this adventure. It’s not the end of the Investment Club, but a new beginning instead. In fact we’ve now got more staff, and more enthusiasm for it, than ever.
But the frustrating truth is that while virtual meetings kept the club together when we all went remote, banks saw things differently. Not only did our bank, HSBC, stop providing IC accounts, but many others did the same. So we’ve had to take a different route.
A baptism of fire
In the innocent days of early 2020, our initial club meetings were held at Stockopedia’s Oxford HQ. By February we’d notched up a few initial positions and things looked promising. But then the Covid-induced market wipeout struck. We were stopped out of everything and burned with an early personal lesson on how brutal stock markets can be.
After that, things turned much brighter. You can read some of the original IC thinking here as well as an update from that first year, but in short we managed to ride the resurgent market really rather well - with a bit of luck thrown in. Among the club rules is an insistence on high StockRanks, but after that it’s all down to the quality of the pitch and the bullishness of club members on the day. We ended that first 12 months with a 52.6% gain.
On reflection, our terrible start made us pay very much closer attention to which industries were being rewarded as Covid developed. You can see from our performance how that worked in our favour. Among the highlights, we had some very strong runs in stocks like Best Of The Best (LON:BOTB), Sylvania Platinum (LON:SLP) and Ergomed (LON:ERGO).
A new start
But while the market was playing, the bank wasn’t. Huge amounts of regulatory red tape have caused many banks to exit the market for IC accounts. Unable to fund…
