The top 10 shares and funds of 2020 - and the biggest 10 losers

Hammerson was the worst company in a terrible year, but tech made AO World the winner

Christmas turkey: Hammerson fell 83%

23 December 2020

It’s that time of the year when investors like to look back over the past 12 months and take stock of, well, their stocks.

Chances are it will have been pretty ghastly. The FTSE 100 started the year at 7604 and today is down at 6480 or thereabouts.

Mind you, that 15% slide could have been worse.

When the markets were in a total panic about Covid in March, it sank below 5000 before central banks and governments took emergency action.

So, with just a handful of trading days left until the New Year, who did the best and who did the worst?

If you thought it would be those most badly hit by Covid - airlines, leisure players and the like - you’d be right.

Cineworld, Carnival cruises and British Airways-owner IAG all looked set to end the year down 63-71%.

But that would have been worse were it not for some partial rallies in the second half as investors began to look beyond the pandemic at a more hopeful future.

Particularly when we finally got some certainty over the outcome of the US elections.

As AJ Bell’s Russ Mould puts it: "Despite a December wobble, as new lockdowns were imposed to the detriment of traditional Christmas activities such as last-minute shopping and celebrations, the second half of the year saw a different batch of winners and losers emerge.

While the year’s worst performer, indebted shopping centres giant Hammerson, still appeared in the laggards league for the second half, so did some newcomers; Homeserve, Moneysupermarket and Serco being among them.

As for the winners, throughout the year it was online fridge seller AO World which took the crown as the biggest riser, with a huge 365% gain, followed by CMC Markets and Premier Foods.

The biggest gainers on Wall Street this year will pretty much all be technology stocks, yet it’s notable that in the UK, that’s far from the case thanks to Britain’s paucity of big tech.

However, three of the UK fund manager Baillie Gifford’s trusts feature in the top 10 winners thanks to their huge stakes in US giants such as Tesla.

So, our indices may be stuffed full of fusty old miners, oil companies and banks, but we can still invest in the hotter sectors in the US, if the mood takes us.

So, here are the biggest risers of the year, by total percentage return:

AO World: up 365% - the company surged on the back of the boom in online shopping, particularly winning with a double whammy of work-from-homers fitting out new white goods and TVs to keep themselves sane.

CMC Markets: up 183% - the spread better made a fortune from the volatility in markets as traders attempted to make a packet.

Premier Foods: up 154% - comfort foods made the Mr Kipling cakemaker a winner among the WFH brigade starved of their office treats.

Petropavlovsk: up 142% - crashing markets sent investors scurrying to gold. Good news for Russia’s biggest gold miners

Indivior: up 141% - opioid addiction treatment group jumped as it settled legal cases against it

Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust: up 130% - big tech, big profits

Baillie Gifford Scottish Mortgage Trust: up104% - ditto

Ferrexpo: up 99.8% - one of the stocks to shoot up in the final weeks of the year on hopes global recovery from Covid crisis would boost iron ore demand

Baillie Gifford Edinburgh Worldwide Trust: up 87% - see above

Allianz Technology Trust : up 85.6%- similar stellar US stock picks to Baillie Gifford.

And the dogs of the year were:

Hammerson: down 82.5% - Lousy management kept the property developer too deeply in shopping malls and heavily in debt. Collapse was inevitable, speeded up by Covid.

Capita: down 76.8% - Covid has hit its private sector contracts and CEO Jon Lewis’s turnaround has hit the buffers

Cineworld: down 71.1% - went into the pandemic saddled with kamikaze levels of debt, then Hollywood cancelled new releases, adding to its on-off lockdown woes

IAG: down 63.3% - British Airways owner was always going to be hard hit by flight cancellations. Reliance on long haul for profits make its climb back next year look ever harder

Micro Focus: down 60.7% - Former software high flier crashed to earth as Covid hit its clients. Shares have been rallying in recent weeks though

Greencore: down 58.9% - sandwich maker suffers as WFH phenomenon means people make lunch at home

Investec: down 58.3% - South Africa-based bank fell into losses with investors fretting about the structure of the company which makes it opaque

Babcock: down 57.3% - engineering giant suffered hit to its civil aviation business by Covid

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