The Evening Standard’s 2020 share tips in review - a year best forgotten

What a horrible year.  

2020 surely goes down as the worst in peacetime history. 

Clearly, the toll on the world’s health was the most horrendous aspect, but the hit to prosperity has been atrocious, too.

Unemployment rocketed and financial markets crashed. 

Few fell more than the FTSE 100, which had the added uncertainty of Brexit to deal with.

It was looking bad enough back in January, when the Evening Standard’s share tipsters were making their picks on who to back. 

Tensions between the US and Iran were rising, although Boris Johnson’s decisive election victory had put paid to fears of a far left government.

Within months, Johnson’s abilities as a leader were thrown into question as he and his team of untested ministers were thrown into the maelstrom of the pandemic, seemingly making mistakes at every turn.

In the 12 months since we made our tips for the year, the FTSE 100 fell 15%. Slightly less – 12% - if you reinvested what few dividends its companies paid - a more “real life” measure known as total shareholder return.  

The second division FTSE All Share lost 10% on that total shareholder return basis.

Sadly, after strongly outperforming the market in recent years, the Evening Standard’s tips failed to live up to expectations in '21, with total returns falling 16.9%.

Our two winners were gold stocks – Fresnillo (up a stonking 90.4%) and Perseus Mining (up 16.5%). OneSavings Bank managed to end the year where it began – a solid performance in the circumstances.

But elsewhere we were left sadly lacking, with our recovery hopefuls Ted Baker, BT and Centrica all… well… failing to recover.  

Indeed, Ted Baker was one of the worst picks in our stock-choosing history, losing 66.77%. The tipster responsible now works elsewhere (!). 

BT (my tip, to my shame) crashed 29% as Covid’s impact on its engineers’ ability to work conspired with continuing trouble getting regulatory approval for price rises to pay for fibre rollout.