Fantasy Fund’s final month: how the Money team has fared … so far

T000 000 ium

ve he Telegraph’s Fantasy Fund Manager game is in its final month and new players can no longer win the grand £20,000 prize.

Among the 14,000 readers playing, your Telegraph Money team has been fighting it out to get to the top. Of course, we are not eligible to win – but there is pride at stake. Each of us has taken a different approach and all have made mistakes, but most of us – note not all – have positives to share.

We rank among the top 2,000 and the bottom 1,000. Of course, that can still change in the final month. Here we explain what we did, why we did it and what we learnt along the way.

TAHA LOKHANDWALA Investment editor Rank: 1,715 I have lived and breathed the game since it started in July, spending far too much time looking at the most bought and sold stocks and forensically analysing what everyone owns.

Given the commitment, I should be doing better, but have just been slow to react. Too late into gold miners, too slow out of them and completely missing the obvious boost for housebuilders when stamp duty was cut.

I was initially bearish on British stocks and had most of my portfolio in American tech investment trusts: Scottish Mortgage, Allianz and Polar Capital. It didn’t pay off in July, but has done better since.

I’ve chopped and changed, bought stocks that had announced results minutes before markets opened and done everything from being 100pc to 0pc in gold miners. Now, I’m focused on overseas markets, backing China with Fidelity China Special Situations, and have added more to the Polar Capital and Scottish Mortgage trusts. Results season is over, so it’s a safer move to diversify. I’m top of the team leaderboard at the moment but won’t get too smug. I know my colleagues can rise as quickly as they’ve fallen.

MARIANNA HUNT Personal finance reporter Rank: 1,752 I’m not all that experienced with picking stocks so decided to split my fund, Wiltshire Mortgage, between the experts and my own choices. I’m also not a believer in day trading (how do you know when to sell?) so I have pretty much stuck to my guns and made just one change to my portfolio since the competition started.

I hold two investment trusts, Scottish Mortgage and Impax Environmental Markets, which invest globally. I also chose property website Rightmove and mortgage lender OneSavings Bank, which were both looking cheap when the competition started. These have been my biggest winners.

The one change I made was to swap out Auto Trader Group, which sells cars, for the airline easyJet. I bought just as countries started being added to the quarantine list, so its share price plummeted. It has recovered a bit but hasn’t given me the boost I needed.

Surprisingly, my boring buy-andhold strategy has done quite well and I’m in the top 2,000 players – although, annoyingly, my boyfriend, who chose his stocks at random and hasn’t looked at them since, is still beating me.

MELISSA LAWFORD Property correspondent Rank: 2,420 I am a novice investor whose main aim with Fantasy Fund Manager was not to humiliate myself in front of my colleagues. I needed a low-maintenance portfolio that would benefit from postpandemic trends and which I could hold without having to reveal how little I know about trading. Investing in the pet industry and the home-working boom felt like no-brainers, so Pets at Home, which is up 17pc, and Sage Group, which supplies business software, made it in.

I figured the drop in oil prices would boost renewables, while the health crisis would drive up pharmaceuticals, so Greencoat UK Wind Plc and AstraZeneca were next. Both eked out gains in July but then dipped. Nonetheless, I’m holding.

For my last pick, I wanted to invest in China and chose Fidelity China Special Situations, an investment trust. Shares are up 5pc. My ranking has been falling, however. At my peak, I was somewhere in the 500s. But my main interest is how I compare to the Money team. There, I am in third place – for now – and I can breathe a sigh of relief and thank beginner’s luck.

SAM BENSTEAD Investment reporter Rank: 3,701 Betting big on housebuilders before moving into gold and silver miners gave me a strong start in this competition, placing me in 250th place at one point but keeping me firmly in the top 1,000 for the first six weeks.

Niche miners such as Hochschild and Centamin gave me easy gains of 10pc in a day – but then left me nursing portfolio losses of 10pc in a week when gold fever died as quickly as it had grown. My £19,000 profit fell to £5,000 in the space of a fortnight as I clutched blindly to hopes of a rebound for the price of the precious metal.

Now, I’m not even in the top three among the Money team. How the mighty have fallen. In a last-ditch effort to regain the top spot, I’ve piled into investment trusts: Scottish Mortgage for exposure to technology companies and Fidelity China Special Situations for Chinese stocks.

SAM BRODBECK Personal finance editor Rank: 3,995 Incredibly, growing my initial £100,000 stake by just £1,797 puts me in the top third of all Fantasy Fund Manager players. My pedestrian performance highlights that I’ve probably not taken enough risk in Brodders Special Situations.

The share price movements of my holdings have been too small to reach either the top of the leaderboard or the pits of despair. Like almost everyone else, I hold GlaxoSmithKline, Oxford BioMedica and Ocado, as well as two of my favourite stocks in real life, Games Workshop and Scottish Mortgage. It was a mistake to buy both easyJet and British Airways owner IAG, though. They were a play on the same theme and moved in tandem. I should have picked a miner to ride the gold rush that (finally) seems to be easing.

My plan for the final four weeks? If you can’t beat the day traders, join them.

ISABELLE FRASER Property editor Rank: 4,103 As a former business reporter and viewer of the television show Billions, I thought I’d be a natural at picking a fund. It turns out that I am actually quite average, partly due to my risk-averse nature.

My approach of picking solid, dependable companies in a balanced basket was perhaps the wrong strategy for Fantasy Fund Manager. I chose Pets at Home and Rightmove – good medium-term bets – and those have done well so far.

The worst pick I made was based on a tip from the investment editor, no less, who suggested I ride the boom of mining stocks and pick Hochschild before it announced results. That was a bad decision for my fund that week, but even worse was that I got out of the stock and then the share price soared.

Lesson learnt. The game rewards allor-nothing plays, so in the next month I’m going to pick a sector – probably housing, as I know it best – then stick with it and cross my fingers.

JONATHAN JONES Investment reporter Rank: 5,452 Less than two weeks ago, I was in danger of taking home the wooden spoon after some disastrous calls. This included holding easyJet for too long, selling Hargreaves Lansdown at precisely the wrong time, and buying pub chain JD Wetherspoon.

Languishing in the bottom 1,000, a rethink for JJ’s Biscuit Fund was required. Since then, I have been buying companies with forthcoming earnings reports that I believe will be ahead of expectations.

I have now climbed the table, gaining almost 8,000 places in the past three weeks and am no longer the Telegraph Money laggard.

Companies such as house-builder Persimmon, gambling firm GVC and takeaway delivery company Just Eat all bounced after results were announced. Hoping to ride this strategy, I recently added IT firm Computacenter and pipe maker Polypipe to my portfolio. Both have results out this month and could do well.

HARRY BRENNAN Senior reporter Rank: 6,790 My portfolio was up 1.5pc – only a little better than the rate of interest I could get in a decent savings account – although has now fallen to a loss.

I went for a reasonably defensive approach in West Country Arbitrage, buying up a mix of investment trusts to diversify (including the Personal Assets Trust) and some bigger, safer stocks that I thought would hold up well in volatile markets – insurers, pharmaceuticals and housebuilders.

Barratt Developments has been my best performer, up 3pc, but packaging firm DS Smith is down by 10pc. My thought was that lots of people in lockdown would be ordering from Amazon and other online shops. But in general the markets, especially in America, have recovered much better than I expected. Owning Scottish Mortgage and Monks – two of my favourite investment trusts, which I own in real life – has helped me to tap into some of this turnaround.

However, overall my US exposure is small and means I have fallen behind in the league tables. If another crash comes along, though, I will be in a better position to capitalise than many.

LAUREN DAVIDSON Head of personal finance Rank: 8,209 Well, this is embarrassing. I challenged you to beat me at Fantasy Fund Manager, flaunting my own face on our adverts, and most of you have done just that. Many of you have even turned a profit, while I have turned £100,000 into £97,941.

Where did I go so wrong? First, I delayed setting up my fantasy fund until July 28 – a full three weeks after the game launched. Most of you sprinted off at the starting gun, with 11,000 people signing up in the first week, while I missed out on 22 days of potential gains.

Second, I haven’t touched my fund since setting it up. My laziness would usually pay off when it comes to investing, if you hold by the theory that markets go up in the long term. But in the short term, with no trading fees or real-life repercussions, players who reshaped their portfolios regularly came out on top.

Third, my choice of stocks. I thought diversifying into a range of sectors would do well during lockdown, but this was wrong for a short-term game. I put 20pc each into consumer goods (Unilever), miners (Rio Tinto), leisure (Games Workshop), housebuilders (Barratt) and healthcare (split between Smith & Nephew and Oxford BioMedica). Most of those have fallen between 5pc and 7pc since I bought in. Only one has returned anything substantial: Oxford BioMedica, which is up 5.8pc since July 28. That’s a silver lining, I suppose: I may not have my pride, but hopefully a vaccine is on the way.

RICHARD EVANS Questor editor Rank: 9,815 All downhill in July, all uphill in August: this is Questor-official’s fantasy fund performance so far.

I have just five holdings and haven’t changed them since shortly after the game began. So understanding why my fund has behaved like this is straightforward enough. Two of my three technology investment trusts, Scottish Mortgage and Allianz Technology, fell slightly ( by about 3pc) in July but rose strongly in August.

My other three holdings fell harder in the first month of the contest but also recovered in the second. Polar Capital Technology lost almost 9pc by July 31 but by the end of last week was 2.6pc higher over the course of the game. Euromoney was 6pc lower at the end of July but broadly flat over the course of the contest at the end of August. Whitbread also posted strong gains in August after a fall the previous month.

The overriding story is no doubt the rise in technology shares last month, driven by big gains in America after earlier losses. Whitbread’s rise was probably unconnected and had more to do with hopes that more holidaymakers would return to its hotels in Britain as fears over coronavirus eased.

I enter the final month full of hope that these trends continue and that my fund can rise all the way from its current undistinguished position to the very top.

JESSICA BEARD Pensions reporter Rank: 13,363 Hundreds of hours spent interviewing fund managers clearly washed straight over me. Erratic, knee-jerk investment decisions with little thought behind them earned me a ticket right to the bottom of the leaderboard. And I deserve it for ignoring every golden rule of investing. The shocking performance of JB Alpha started with a £7,000 loss in the first three days. By the end of July, I had eroded £12,000 from my initial pot. How did I do it? Buying high and selling low.

My steepest losses were made when Capita, one of my largest investments, fell 20pc in one day. Of course, I decided to rid my fund of the stock, only to watch it bounce back solidly the next day.

Playing copycat and investing in the shares held by those at the top of the scoreboard was another losing strategy. The strong rallies enjoyed by others were often followed by price corrections the next day just as I bought in. One thing is clear: I should have spent more time thinking about my chosen investments. If I hope to jump up the pack in any meaningful way, I will have to take some big risks. At least I have nothing to lose.