Each year there is a stock picking competition, which I believe started on ShareTrader.co.nz, and is now sponsored by NZ Herald (I may be wrong about that). The competition requires each participant to select 5 stocks at the start of the year and a backup stock in case one gets bought out. The winner is the participant who’s stock price (adding any dividend payments) has increased the most from the start of the year to the end of the year.
I find the competition quite difficult because of the time of year it starts. Typically I don’t do a lot of research over the Christmas break, and it’s often a time that is between company announcements, so it’s a bit of a guess where things are at, at that time of year. Also prices are a bit random due to the annual Santa Rally.
Nevertheless, here are my picks for the 2021 competition:
- FPH
- SUM
- RYM
- EBO
- HLG (I was very tempted to pick ATM, but I don’t expect the Daigou Channel [Australia/China travel] to have recovered by the end of the year – ATM will likely be my pick for the following year)
Feel free to record your own picks in the comments at the bottom of this article, or head over to the sharetrader.co.nz website to enter officially (though I think it might be a bit late if you haven’t already entered – still, there’s no reason you can’t comment your picks below and join in the fun).
Addendum: These picks (or anything on this website) does not constitute financial advice and [as inferred in the article] very little research has gone into this selection of stocks for the purpose of this competition.
4 replies on “2021 Stock Picking Competition”
The final results are that these selections gained 10.8% over the year, including dividends. Pretty bad, but better than all but two of the broker picks and the selection beat the NZX 50 (not that it’s such a difficult thing to do).
Geez, up just shy of 6% on these picks. Sill mainly held back by RYM which is down about 20%. At least my personal portfolio is faring much better. Still better than the NZX 50 index, which is nearly down 5%.
Just a quick check in, I’m currently running 11.5% up on my competition stock picks so far this year (inclusive of dividends).
That’s not bad, but also not great. This has beb significantly dragged down by RYM and FPH having had zero growth. Though I have FPH in my personal portfolio, I don’t have RYM and I’m happy to say that FPH makes a much smaller allocation of my portfolio than HLG and SUM do. That said, I’m pretty happy to hold all these stocks (excluding RYM).
Thought I’d do a quick check to see how I’m performing so far, since we’re more than half way through the year.
All in all, including dividends I’m about 3% up since the start of the year. The only bad pick was Ryman which is down about 15%.
Fortunately Ryman is the only stock in my list of picks that I don’t actually own 🙂
I’m not too happy with my +3% return, but at least it’s beating the NZX 50, which is currently down 5.84%!
I wonder how others are faring.