Week 04 of 2013
Last weeks noises from congress on pushing the Feb deadline on debt ceiling talks to April become reality as congress passed a bill to kick the can down the road. This will be partly welcome to the markets but at the same time unwelcome. It hurts making big decisions but they have to be made. You can’t put it off for ever.
Equities are in major demand at present as QE3 sloshes around. The S&P hit’s a 5 year high and the DOW and FTSE are not far behind. Looking back at 2007, whilst it was an accident waiting to happen – growth was strong. Today, we have the UK economy dancing with the prospect of a triple dip recession thanks mostly to an inept chancellor. Euro and US appear to be stabilising but are hardly steaming ahead. Merkel has elections this later this year so you can bet ya bottom dollar that ‘issues’ will be kicked down the road (like the US) until that event is over. That said – the results from Germany’s Lower Saxony state last week really doesn’t bode well for her.
The Dow closed week 4 at 13896 and a 246pt gain for the week. At last – it tops its 2012 highs. The FTSE 100 closed at 6284, a weekly gain of 130pts. That’s nearly 1000pts in just 6 months.
A virtual portfolio has been set up using the 2012 final trading day close figures as a starting point and £1000 has been invested in each stock. This does not include buying fees or stamp duty and is purely intended to be used as a benchmark or summary for each week. One newspaper top ten picks for 2013 has been included to help monitor/compare against. A pi ‘polled’ top picks list (from LSE bulletin boards) has been included this year.
Week 04 stock picks summary:
It’s all change across the stock picks for 2013. The LSE BB polled picks surges ahead after a massive week which saw their yearly total double in the week.
Not much to split the Independent and Sharehub b-list picks at present. The Hotlist having led for the last 3 weeks was hit by a handful of underperforming stocks. News flow on PVR was shrugged off and after a strong rise on Afren, the market decided to take some cream off on Friday. The latter traded more like an AIM minnow rather than a fully paid up member of the ftse 250. Very large volume and certainly one to keep an eye on.
The last time the indices were at near 2007 levels – many equities were much much higher than they are today. In fact – there’s some AIM players that are lower than 2009 levels which defies belief especially as their businesses are in the same level of order now as they were then.
It’s more a sign of the bruises and damage done by a major credit crisis and a double dip recession.
Risk appetite should be on and whilst some pundits might tell it is – I’d say that it still has a long way to go yet before the markets start pricing in the good stuff rather than the poor stuff.
That said – looking at the LSE BB polled picks for 2013 and there are a fair few risk on picks there which have been beaten up over the last 2 years. Hence there are signs that the beaten up ‘guy or girl’ might be back in demand.
48 weeks to go. Still early days.
Current standings / Week 04 Results
1. The LSE BB List 2013 +11.37% (weekly gain of 5.79%)
2. TheShareHub’s 2013 B-List +7.21% (weekly gain of 2.21%)
3. The Independent 2013 +7.16% (weekly gain of 0.87%)
4. TheShareHub’s 2013 Hotlist +5.34% (weekly loss of 1.94%)
Click on Portfolio image to enlarge
Good news from Bowleven today. Finally, at last, an oil discovery but now needs to be proved up
Agreed – good news on Bowleven latest drill, but we’ve been here before in the past and they’ve failed to gain the necessary data to support the discoveries and build the commercial story.
In a few weeks time – they may well have that data. At the moment, they have optimism and good cause to be excited.
BLVN shareholders really need to see a well drilled successfully and without flaky data. Management need to pin this prospect down and are doing their best with what looks like tricky structures/geology.