Three months ago we reflected on how Growth and Momentum had been winning investing strategies in 2015. But all that changed in the first quarter of the new year. Stockopedia’s tracking of 60 strategies inspired by the legends of finance saw most investing styles get beaten back by rocky market conditions. But there were still some strong results, plus a marked upturn among the Value strategies, driven by a sector that’s long been out of fashion - natural resources.
Before taking a closer look at how events unfolded, it’s worth having a quick recap on how these strategies work and what the performance stats tell us. Since late 2011, we’ve been tracking the returns from a range of approaches used by some of the world’s best known investors. They’re rebalanced quarterly to ensure that the the shares in each portfolio match the rules of each strategy as closely as possible. We don’t account for the drag of trading costs or the bonus of dividend payments.
It’s important to know that these models aren’t always realistically investable. At times, there may be very few companies that meet the rules of some of them. And because there are no restrictions on company size, sector or index, there’s no simple way of benchmarking them. So we show the FTSE 100 for the sake of comparison rather than as a meaningful benchmark.
Here is how the various main UK indices and Guru Screens performed in Q1:
Index / Strategy Composite |
Performance Q1 2016 |
-1.1% |
|
-1.4% |
|
-2.9% |
|
-1.0% |
|
-5.2% |
|
Guru Strategy Composite |
-1.4% |
-6.1% |
|
-1.2% |
|