The art of share tipping has finally paid off: 2023 may have been a bad year for economic forecasters (who predicted a recession that never came) and a dull one for the London market, but it was a good year for the newspaper share tipsters. Most annual share portfolios comfortably beat the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 in 2023, reversing a two-year run in which investors would have done better by ignoring most of the tipsters and putting their cash in an index tracker instead.
The Daily Mail’s Midas portfolio tops the table this year. The Daily Mail’s tipsters often take the high-risk, high-reward approach of backing little known mid-caps and small-caps, typically in the UK. Risk is further increased via concentration: last year’s portfolio only had three tips. While that approach can lead to disaster – witness heavy losses in 2022 – it can also ensure that gains from a few excellent shares are not watered down by more mediocre performers. The Daily Mail’s returns were highly dispersed, including a nasty 15.3% loss on marine engineering specialist Harland & Wolff, the firm that once built the Titanic. Yet that didn’t sink the wider portfolio thanks in large part to a superb 135% rally in drug-testing specialist hVivo.
The silver medal goes to US publication Barron’s. The magazine’s portfolio has performed well in recent years thanks to the long-running outperformance of its home market. That said, the Barron’s team still demonstrated stock-picking savvy, with a 31% total return comfortably beating the benchmark S&P 500’s 24.5% in 2023 until the portfolio was liquidated in mid-December. Returns were boosted by “Magnificent Seven” members Amazon (up 67.8%) and Google-owner Alphabet (up 46.6%), but the weekly’s best tip was actually luxury housebuilder Toll Brothers, which more
