Stockopedia

As the founder of Stockopedia.com, you might presume that I've always understood how the stock market works. The truth is anything but... Back in 2007 I was flying high as a full time private investor. I held a concentrated portfolio of 5 stocks that had quadrupled over 4 years. Each of these holdings I had absolute conviction in and I'd pyramided... my sizes up at higher & higher prices. I told my wife that one of the holdings would quintuple by Christmas. I couldnt see any downside. When the bottom fell out of the market and my portfolio tanked by more than 50% I was pretty distraught to say the least. I was an Oxford Scholar and a former Goldman Sachs wealth manager - how could I have got it so wrong? I spent the next 5 years figuring it out. Together with my friend & eventual co-founder David Brickell, we read, re-read and modelled every single academic paper on what works in stock markets and why people make big money mistakes. I realised that I wasnt alone. It wasn't just me that was over-confident, believed the hype, bet too big, in too few stocks and hung onto them too long. In fact, I found a study of tens of thousands of private investor accounts that showed a remarkable tendency for almost everyone to fall into these very same behavioural traps. It led to a complete re-evaluation of everything I thought I knew. We discovered deep within the academic research a little known method called Factor Investing. It built upon the insights of the great value & momentum investors towards a robust, repeatable framework that anyone could use successfully. Not only had it delivered consistently higher returns at lower risk, but it offered a way to control the emotional side of investing through a rules-based approach. This was the key Id been looking for. The only issue was that to implement it required a massive amount of institutional grade financial data and enough computational power to calculate the metrics required. There was no way I could afford to pay for this on my own. But I thought, just maybe, if ...Read More