This week saw the biggest five-day slide in the FTSE 100 since mid-2011. Most of the blame lies with a tumbling oil price, weak economic data from China and political uncertainty in Greece. For investors, this sort of stomach-churning volatility is utterly miserable. But there have been some winners. John Authers in the FT wrote an excellent piece this week about how low volatility stocks have performed admirably in the current conditions.
It's perhaps a little early to figure out precisely what worked in the stock market this year. But the early signs suggest that a mix of Quality & Value was one of the best ways to pick winners in an otherwise flat market - we took a look at the top 10 Quality stocks for 2015 here. On the subject of quality, we liked this blog from Todd Wenning… when is a faux leather sofa really a good deal?!
Strategies Editor, Ben Hobson also penned this article at This is Money, looking at a current crop of top 10 growth shares - and the tricks famous investors use to spot stocks that can keep on climbing.
We've been syndicating a column to Interactive Investor on some of the topics we've covered at Stockopedia many times - here's one from this week about using the Value Rank to uncover deep value shares on AIM. It got a nice tweet from “What Works on Wall St" author James O'Shaughnessy which rather tickled the team here.
Do remember that we will be conducting a free webinar on Wednesday 17 December at 12.30pm, entitled Value Investing - from Graham to Greenblatt & beyond. You can register for it here.
On the subject of O'Shaughnessys, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Quant, Philosopher and next in line, writes a terrific blog at Millennial Invest - we are reading his book Millennial Money which has some great chapters on systematic investing. We fully endorse his focus on finding high quality, good value, strong momentum shares… of course ! Read his great blog this week on Value and Momentum here.
Indeed, for those that scoff at momentum investing, this is an interesting interlude from Man Group about all the behavioural reasons that…
