Happy New Year 2023! December Sharepicking Game Winners

We hope you enjoyed a nice Christmas time with your family and we wish you a Happy New Year 2023…! Now let’s take a look at how the market has been doing in December and who the top stock pickers are…

FTSE All Share was down 1.6% during the month, marking a clear retracement after it approached previous highs in early December. Below are the results of the December league.

UK Share Picking Game December Results

We are pleased to announce the top stock pickers in the U.K. Share Picking Game for December as follows.

Congratulations to the winners:

1st    TheFinanceGuru: 102%
2nd   Pierre Custard: 62%
3rd    btu: 61%

Special congratulations go to TheFinanceGuru who won the month league for the first time, with a convincing lead of 40%! 

Congratulations to Cabardes for placing the best BUY pick (LBG Media: 69%) and Casey’s Dad for placing the best SELL pick (Moonpig Group: 32%)!

Add these top proven stock pickers to your watchlist and you will get automatic updates of what their picks are… This may help your research moving forward.

The idea of the UK Share Picking Game is to build a UK Share Picking community who can help each other out through accountability and transparency.

So use the chat features and watchlist functionality and engage with each other’s trading ideas.
 
99% of the picks from the Top 3 players were placed as SELL picks (1% SELL picks from Top 3 players). 

On the other hand, for all players SELL picks took up a much lower percentage than the Top 3 players (25% SELL picks for all players).

The Top 3 players on average placed 28 picks while the average number of picks of all players was 24. 

So try to fully utilise the maximum allowed number of picks (40 per month). This may increase your chances of arriving on the leader board or winning the league. 

Your FREE Stockomendation account can help you in the real world

Cabardes‘ BUY pick on LBG Media was in an amazing profit of 69% in December! 

LBG Media said in a trading update on 19 December that, after a “robust performance” in the second half to-date, full-year revenue was expected to be about £63m.

The Stockomendation five-star broker Berenberg also placed a Buy recommendation on LBG Media on 20 December. It is currently in a nice profit of 46%…!

The Stockomendation Momentum Score (which indicates the short term swing of opinion towards a stock) was up from 0 to 0.48 since 20 December. This suggests market sentiments in this company shifted towards the positive side. 

Our new functionality called Short Positions placed by funds on UK stocks shows that no fund managers currently have a short position in LBG Media, which is a positive sign for the potential buyers of the stock as you generally don’t want to bet against the top hedge funds. 

With a Stockomendation account you may have followed Berenberg, cross-checked Stockomendation LBG Media‘s Momentum Score, and also noticed there was no short position from any fund on the company in the Stockomendation short positions feature.

Then, you could have bought into the company’s stock and earned that amount of profit as well…! 

So use Stockomendation to follow the highest rated stock analysts and brokers.
 

Market conditions

 


Below is a summary of some key economic data released in December.

•    Inflation rates: US (7.1%) – lower than expected (lower is good), UK (10.7%) – lower than expected.
•    Interest rates: US (4% -> 4.5%) as expected, UK (3% -> 3.5%), Euro Area (2% -> 2.5%) as expected.
•    GDP growth: UK (1.5%) – higher than forecast.
•    Employment change: UK (27K) – better than forecast.

Overall, we have seen improving economic data, i.e. better GDP, better employment and better than expected inflation.

Among these metrics, inflation is currently the key as it affects central banks’ interest rate decisions, which have high influence on the economy as a whole. Generally, a target of 2-3% for the inflation rate is considered healthy for the economy by most central banks. 

From a stock trader/investor’s perspective, we also want inflation to be low because that’s when most of the stock market bull rallies start to happen.

Recently we have seen dropping inflation for the first time since 2020. However, based on past data from historical high inflation periods, e.g. 1940-1950 and 1970-1980, we can learn that high inflation doesn’t come and go within one or two years.

Instead, high inflation comes in multiple waves which could last 10 years based on history! So it is possible we are currently within the first inflation hike wave and the inflation drop (as we see recently) could be temporary before it surges again!  

Not saying the stock market is going to keep low for as long as the inflation stays high but we need to be extra cautious in the high inflation environment. That’s when the stock market is highly volatile and may react to economic news more aggressively than usual.

So stay tuned for analysis on the market and keep participating in the game in 2023!

Good Luck! The UK Share Picking Game Team