The Stockopedia Story
We're here to help individual investors win in the stock market. But here's why it matters.
Dear Investor,
As the founder of Stockopedia.com, you might presume that I've always understood how the stock market works.
The truth is anything but...
A very bad time...
Back in 2007 I was flying high as a full time private investor. I held a concentrated portfolio of 5 stocks that had quadrupled over 4 years. Each of these holdings I had absolute conviction in and I'd pyramided my sizes up at higher & higher prices. I told my wife that one of the holdings would quintuple by Christmas. I couldn't see any downside.
When the bottom fell out of the market and my portfolio tanked by more than 50% I was pretty distraught to say the least. I was an Oxford Scholar and a former Goldman Sachs wealth manager - how could I have got it so wrong?
I spent the next 5 years figuring it out. Together with my friend & eventual co-founder David Brickell, we read, re-read and modelled every single academic paper on what works in stock markets and why people make big money mistakes. I realised that I wasn't alone. It wasn't just me that was over-confident, believed the hype, bet too big, in too few stocks and hung onto them too long. In fact, I found a study of tens of thousands of private investor accounts that showed a remarkable tendency for almost everyone to fall into these very same behavioural traps. It led to a complete re-evaluation of everything I thought I knew.
A discovery...
We discovered deep within the academic research a little known method called Factor Investing. It built upon the insights of the great value & momentum investors towards a robust, repeatable framework that anyone could use successfully. Not only had it delivered consistently higher returns at lower risk, but it offered a way to control the emotional side of investing through a rules-based approach. This was the key I’d been looking for.
The only issue was that to implement it required a massive amount of institutional grade financial data and enough computational power to calculate the metrics required. There was no way I could afford to pay for this on my own. But I thought, just maybe, if enough others had the same problem and felt the same way, we could club together to pay for it collectively.
This was the founding drive behind Stockopedia.com.
The impact...
After a huge amount of effort in 2012 the service launched. And since that day we've helped build & protect hundreds of millons in wealth for more than ten thousand DIY individual investors. The results speak for themselves. Our subscriber community have consistently outperformed the market ever since we launched.
More than this, every new subscriber to Stockopedia helps the whole. We’ve invested every single penny earned since our launch into better content, cleaner data, a stronger team and a more complete all-round service that is now acclaimed by the financial press and industry awards. We’ve built up a track record of delivering ground-breaking research & innovative features that speed up decision making & improve results - like the StockRanks™ , RiskRatings & Style Classifications. But there's so much more to do.
Our founding principles remain:
- We don't service institutions, we help individual investors like you and I.
- We don't give share tips, we coach investors to become fully self-reliant.
- We don't hide our methods in a black box, we choose transparencyto accelerate education.
And we're still full of ideas. Our product backlog now stretches as far as anyone's life can fill, and we plan on continuing to deliver it.... extending the service to help our subscribers in every part of their investing.
Take a trial for no obligation...
If you sign up for a completely free 14-day trial, you'll immediately feel the benefits of our easy to use and simple to navigate service. But the real benefits of a Stockopedia subscription are felt over time.
Should Stockopedia not measure up to your expectations, you may cancel within the 1-month trial period and you won't be charged anything. No questions asked. Furthermore, if you are not fully satisfied and cancel within 30 days after the billing date, we will issue you a complete refund. I can make this offer as almost everyone who takes a subscription stays for the long term. So this is my 100% money back guarantee.
We've now attracted more than 10,000 subscribers to our service. I can't promise that your results will match the historic returns that so many speak about as the future is unpredictable, but I know that joining the site will transform the way you think about investing forever. You will gain confidence, time and have a lot more fun while doing it.
Safe investing,
Edward Croft, CFA
CEO, Stockopedia.com