The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
STILL TIME TO WIN £ 20,000
Fantasy Fund Manager has only a month left and some are trying everything they can to win £20,000. Here is a selection of their strategies
Picking your own stocks is fraught with risk. But if you remove the possibility of losing money and add the chance of winning a £20,000 prize, well, you have a game on your hands.
The Daily Telegraph’s Fantasy Fund Manager competition is entering its final month and from Friday Sept 4 those not yet playing will not be able to win the grand £20,000 prize, courtesy of sponsors AJ Bell Youinvest.
The aim of the game is simple: turn £100,000 into as much as possible by owning the best FTSE 350 companies.
More than 13,000 players have signed up so far. Some have managed to break the £140,000 mark, while others are nursing a £10,000 loss.
It is not over though. Selecting the right stocks on the right day can easily propel a fund thousands of places up the leaderboard.
Thus far, the game has been dominated by the rising gold price. Owning five gold miners once put your fund firmly at the top. However, the trade is over and those who backed gold for too long have fallen away.
Alongside the £20,000 grand prize, players have the chance to win £100 for having the best returning fund of the week. Chris Osmond, our latest winner, shot up the rankings by buying beaten-up retail stocks, as he discusses on the right.
Players have been taking huge risks in the hope of pushing their funds to the top of the leaderboard. We catch up with some of our keenest and best – all hoping to come out on top when the game ends in October.
Can you beat them? Sign up at telegraph.co.uk/fantasy-fund.
‘Grandma showed me the ropes’
Age and experience are by no means guarantees of success in investing. This is what 16-year-old Dawson Rogers proved when the fantasy fund he helps his father manage – Drogers.co – soared to a high of £113,879 on Aug 5.
The teenager from Banbury, Oxfordshire, who has just completed his GCSEs, was among the top 500 players at the time. Although not old enough to play because of the competition rules, Dawson asked his father, Mark, to create an account for his son to suggest stocks to pick.
Dawson has been interested in stock markets since the age of 11 when his grandmother, Jessica, told him about her investing club.
He initially chose fallen angels such as Royal Dutch Shell and HSBC, but they just went on to fall further. He then started reading about markets and changed tack: investing in healthcare companies such as AstraZeneca and mining stocks Hochschild and Petropavlovsk.
“I thought healthcare would do well because of the pandemic and read that gold miners were going up,” he said. “Grandma has also been explaining which sectors might do well.”
Dawson recently attended a meeting of the investing club. “The fund has fallen back to around 5,000th place though so I have lots more to learn,” he added.
‘Call me lucky, but I was right’
Closely following companies’ financial results and buying the ones that might beat expectations has earned Chris Osmond, 69, from Hove, a £100 prize. He had the best fund last week. One notable success was Frasers Group, the retail giant, which he bought just in time for a 20pc rally.
“It had been doing badly for months and I thought this was undeserved. Call it lucky, but I bought it at the right time,” said Mr Osmond.
He applied the same strategy to Provident Financial, a lender, and watched its value jump by 18pc. This pick has helped keep Mr Osmond’s fund, ChippyChips, in the top 50.
“You want shares that will do well tomorrow if you want to beat the market,” he said.
Most fantasy fund players take more risk with their investments in the game than in real life. But not Mr Osmond. He follows the same strategy – of buying companies that have been sold by other investors but could surprise the market with positive results.
“In my real-life portfolio I use this strategy with companies outside the FTSE 350 to turn quick profits. I sometimes hold a company for just a day,” he said.
He calculated that since March he had grown his real portfolio by 30pc. “I find it fun and don’t get too attached to companies,” he said.
‘Gold stopped working’
It was easy for Sam Benstead, a Telegraph investment reporter, to feel smug. His eponymous fund was in the top 1,000 for the first six weeks of the game, breaking into the top 250 at one point, putting him miles ahead of his
Telegraph Money peers. “Writing about investments should mean you have good knowledge about which stocks will move,” he said.
“I correctly bet on housebuilders and transitioned smoothly into gold and silver miners. A 10pc rise in a day was not uncommon for niche miners such as Hochschild Mining and Centamin.”
But gold fever peaked and as quickly as the share prices had risen, they fell. “I went from £119,000 to £105,000 in just two weeks,” he said. This left him nursing portfolio losses of 10pc. As gold fell, his rivals moved into beaten-up companies due a rebound, such as Cineworld, Aston Martin and easyJet. “But I held on to gold for too long and now I’m around the 3,000 mark, not even in the top three for the Money team,” Mr Benstead added.
He has now rebalanced in the hope of regaining the top spot, although he is ineligible to win the prize. He bought technologyheavy investment trusts such as Scottish Mortgage and Chinese stocks via Fidelity China Special Situations investment trust.
‘I’ll switch tack’
The tactic of buying companies about to announce results has worked for many, including Rory Melough, 39, from Walsall. But as the “reporting season” comes to an end, they will have to change tack.
“I think you just have to ask what stocks will do well in the current situation: where is people’s income going to be spent?” Mr Melough said.
His fund, RorCap, has risen through the ranks, going from 5,000th place at the start of August to the top 20 now.
“I started by owning what I had in my Isa – Diageo, BAE Systems and Experian – but then started looking at who was reporting. The insurers did well for me,” he said. “Consumers are spending a little more so I’ve had a bit of luck with William Hill and GVC.”
‘You’ve got to keep changing’
Despite starting the game two weeks late, Philip Lisberg, 58, from Manchester, made it to the top of the table at one point and is now in around 100th place. He has an extremely active approach and changes his fund, Swingline, constantly.
He first backed gold and silver mining stocks but then moved to oil companies as the commodity’s price rose. He said: “You’ve got to keep changing to get to the top.”
The game has been dominated by gold but the trade is over and its backers have fallen