Twelve months ago, stock markets in the UK and around the world were facing turmoil as Covid took hold. The initial price reversal was breathtaking. But unlike other serious sell-offs in recent memory - particularly the 2009 financial crisis - markets bottomed-out quite quickly.
Within weeks of the pull-back last February and March, some stocks and sectors were recovering. Others were even flourishing. Across the market there were emerging lockdown winners (and losers), all set against the backdrop of exceptional economic chaos.
It all set the scene for a year in which investors could (and some did) do very well in the stock market -- and that’s exactly what we heard in the results of our 2020 subscriber survey, which we sent out recently.
A successful year for many investors
Every year we sound-out Stockopedia users to hear how they’ve fared in the market and whether they’re feeling bullish or bearish about the future. Despite the fear and volatility that dominated the early months of 2020, ultimately shares did well, and so have many of our subscribers…
Indeed, a very solid 86 percent of the ~1,400 users who replied to the survey said they had outperformed or significantly outperformed the market since they started using the platform. Thirteen percent said that they had matched the market, while just four percent had underperformed or significantly underperformed.
Those results are quite a leap on the already strong performances reported a year earlier, in 2019. Back then, seventy percent of respondents said they’d outperformed or significantly outperformed the market since joining Stockopedia, with 22 percent matching the market and eight percent underperforming it.
Digging into the detail of 2020, an impressive 16 percent of respondents said they’d seen a performance of more than 50 percent in the previous 12 months. Nineteen percent said their performance had come in at between 30 and 50 percent. Forty-three percent said they’d seen a gain of between 10 and 30 percent. And fourteen percent said their performance had been between zero and 10 percent.
Widely held winners in 2020
As for widely held winners, our findings from the 2020 survey show a huge number of names. We asked respondents to tell us which stocks had given them the best returns, and the table below highlights the most widely held winners and how they performed:
Share | Ticker | %… |
