Apologies for the long absence. I know this has been one of the most popular threads and it has been truly awesome to see the sustained response.
I have had quite a crazy year with the birth of my second child in May, house extension and a terminally ill family member who’s practically my age.
The stock market has been all over the place and I think when we started this project in February it was the peak of a bull run. If we had started it 6 weeks later it would have looked quite different. This project was always going to be a high risk portfolio by its very nature and in the tough times it will see wild swings. That is why a FTSE tracker will seem a better prospect in the short term during market troubles, but lags behind long term.
This is why investors should always dollar cost average. Putting money aside monthly and buying in the good times as well as the bad.
I have been asked by quite a few members to return to the forum and contribute and I would like to thank all of you who have kindly appreciated my work and time to the community over the years - although I’m more of a cheerleader for FT rather than anything more technical! It was a pleasure to meet a few of you on the investor meetup.
I’ll try and chip in a bit more now, but I’ll hand the project to someone who has offered to take it on and who is quite active on the forum. @NeilB will now edit the link.
We will run it again for the new year - probably a new thread will be best. We can create a new tab on the spreadsheet for the 2022 stocks.
So well done all of you who did well, it has been a difficult year and many investors haven’t had great returns. Ironically for all of us Freetrade Investors our investment in our app has been probably one of the best performing this year!
So be diversified, do your research, dollar cost average and enjoy the ride.
This can be done pretty easily in Google sheets. You just use the GOOGLEFINANCE function to get the stock price from a certain date.
I couldn’t say whether the stock picks would beat the market from that date. I would say most people here pick riskier stocks than the market average, but can’t say whether they’d now be beating or trailing the market.
It is always a difficult one. Over the last few years, I’ve tripled my money - averaging 100% a year - including my FT investment which was always part of my portfolio strategy. This year was my worst one to date and first “bad” year. I still have more overall than I did last year though thanks to my FT shares - so I can’t complain!
I do that as well, I include my whole portfolio of ‘investments’. I’ve put in what equates to about 1 year’s salary over the last few years and returned almost 2 year’s salary, which is pretty crazy.
I’ve described it to my friends and family as sitting on my backside and reading things online and making more than my salary in investments.
Hold fire with any selections for now, given the last week I think it might be advisable for people to be allowed to re select
I want to say a massive thanks to @Rollingskies and wish you a more sleep filled and hopefully positive 2022. Playing with the google sheet I can appreciate the hard work that has gone into making it and I assure you it’s in safe hands, even if that means more GIFS and less formulae!
I might need to recruit some co-fund managers for 2022 so if you’re happy to help update the sheet and do some basic house keeping it would be much appreciated with drop a comment below or fire me a DM.
I think this spreadsheet clearly shows stock picking to be extremely high risk for the majority of investors. I don’t think I could realistically convince myself that that I could double my money every year so cannot therefore put money where my mouth is. We’ve failed in 2021 but the strategy can still be successful. I’d argue against thinking by calendar year and instead maybe “within 3Y”, a few multibaggers can more than offset the duds. Happy investing!
Michael Saylor says investing for less than 4 years is more akin to gambling than investing. I don’t quite agree, but he’s right in that if you look at a decision to invest over 4 years a dip in 1 year can be immaterial. If you don’t believe in a company to be worth investing in 4 years later it is really a punt on a short term gain.
I expect this very ametuer and novice experiement to still totally outperform the FTSE100. I was wrong short term, but that was always going to be a risk if the markets and economy went south that it would be hit harder.
@NeilB I recommend a new thread as soon as possible and stock choices to be submitted anytime and the trading date to be perhaps 5th January or whenever the first trading day is for both NYSE and UK.
With Microsoft at the helm? Their Xbox gaming exploits have been a car crash from the outset, desperately throwing money at their problems and going nowhere.
I suspect Activision/Blizzard will be the new Nokia, where Microsoft use them and cast the empty husk aside when Microsoft are done.
It’s had a 20% rise on the Microsoft news, but that will slowly ebb away when the reality sets in, that they will now be making games for just 25% of the console market and not 100% of the market, when Microsoft dictate that they are now merely a tool to try and leverage poor Xbox sales.
