Tag: nvesting

I found my old stock picks. How badly did I do?

While tidying up this blog, I found an old page called Stocks-up. I had almost forgotten it existed.

It was a simple diary of shares I had bought or followed, with dates going back as far as 2008. At some point in 2016 I added a line saying that, had I put £500 into each of the 19 companies and still held them all, I would have been about £3,800 in profit.

That was obviously going to need checking.

I wanted to know what would have happened if I really had put £500 into every company on the date I recorded and then mostly left the whole strange collection alone. More importantly, once I started looking at it properly, I wanted to compare that with the much less exciting alternative: putting the same money into savings and leaving that alone instead.

It turns out the answer depends quite a lot on what we mean by doing nothing.

Rebuilding a portfolio I never actually had

The £500 figure on the old page was always hypothetical. My real trades varied, so this is not an attempt to recreate an old brokerage account. Instead, I have treated the page as a small experiment.

£500 into each of the 19 companies on the dates I recorded gives a total of £9,500, although the contributions were spread between 2008 and 2016 rather than invested all at once.

For companies that are still listed, I reconstructed the original holding from the historic share price and followed it through to late July 2026. For companies that were acquired, merged or disappeared, I followed the relevant corporate action instead. Where dividends and distributions were paid, I have modelled them as being reinvested where that can be reconstructed sensibly.

That last part matters much more than I expected.

The figures are deliberately approximate. Historical prices sometimes come from the nearest available trading date, adjusted-price series are being used as a total-return proxy for several long-running holdings, foreign holdings introduce exchange rates and ADR details, and Restaurant Group had a rights issue that makes a completely passive outcome unusually messy. I have excluded tax, dealing costs and personal allowances from both investments and savings.

This is an experiment, not a brokerage statement.

What happened to the £500 stock picks?

One company, CloudTag, is impossible to put a sensible current value on. It was delisted from AIM in March 2017 and shareholders retained shares in an unquoted private company. Its final public quote would have valued the hypothetical £500 holding at about £781, but that is not the same as having £781 that could be sold today.

I have therefore excluded CloudTag from the main comparison and used the remaining 18 holdings. That leaves £9,000 invested on exactly the same original dates.

Company Approx. value with distributions / corporate actions Profit / loss Approx. return
AFC Energy, now H-Power £261 -£239 -47.8%
Barclays £2,717 +£2,217 +443.4%
Boohoo, now Debenhams Group £246 -£254 -50.8%
Burford Capital £1,674 +£1,174 +234.8%
Glencore £4,349 +£3,849 +769.8%
iRobot £0 -£500 -100.0%
ITV £1,136 +£636 +127.2%
Just Eat £232 -£268 -53.6%
Kodal Minerals £1,167 +£667 +133.4%
McBride £570 +£70 +14.0%
Pantheon Resources £57 -£443 -88.6%
Restaurant Group ~£251 -£249 -49.8%
Sepura £599 +£99 +19.8%
South32 ADR ~£1,090 +£590 +118.0%
Sirius Minerals £75 -£425 -85.0%
Tullow Oil £16 -£484 -96.8%
Taylor Wimpey £584 +£84 +16.8%
Whitbread £1,018 +£518 +103.6%
Total ~£16,042 +£7,042 +78.2%

That table is much more revealing than the share prices alone.

If I simply look at the share prices and takeover proceeds, ignoring the income paid along the way, the same 18 positions come out at only about £11,500. Once dividends, distributions and material corporate actions are accounted for, the reconstructed value rises to about £16,000.

In other words, concentrating only on whether the share price went up or down misses roughly £4,500 of the result in this particular collection.

Dividends changed the answer

Glencore is the most extreme example. The original £500 at roughly 89.5p bought around 559 shares. On share price alone, those would now be worth about £3,000, which is already a very good result.

But Glencore has returned a lot of cash to shareholders over the years. Modelling those distributions being reinvested, including the June 2026 payment but excluding the distribution the company cancelled in 2020, takes the holding to roughly £4,350.

Barclays is another good example. Its share price alone turns the reconstructed £500 into around £1,565. Using a dividend-adjusted total-return series pushes that to roughly £2,717.

ITV goes from roughly £543 on share price alone to about £1,136 with distributions reflected. Taylor Wimpey goes from around £268 to £584. Whitbread goes from roughly £734 to just over £1,000, with the added complication of the very substantial capital returns that followed the sale of Costa.

None of this means dividends are free money. The share price adjusts when cash leaves a company, and reinvesting the dividend simply puts that cash back to work. The point is more basic: if the question is “what happened to my £500?”, looking only at today’s share price does not answer it.

Some of them disappeared completely

The other thing a ten-to-eighteen-year experiment gives you is plenty of corporate archaeology.

iRobot is the cleanest disaster. It entered Chapter 11 and its restructuring became effective in January 2026. The old common stock was cancelled and extinguished. £500 became £0.

Sirius Minerals was acquired by Anglo American for 5.5p per share. The reconstructed £500 holding returned roughly £75.

Sepura went the other way. Hytera acquired it for 20p per share in 2017, which turned the approximate £500 holding into £599.

Just Eat became Just Eat Takeaway.com at a ratio of 0.09744 JET shares for each original Just Eat share. Prosus then acquired the remaining JET shares, with the final minority-shareholder process in July 2026 paying €21 per share including statutory interest. Following the whole chain leaves the original hypothetical £500 at about £232.

Restaurant Group is the awkward one. It paid dividends, then ran a 13-for-9 rights issue in 2018 before Apollo eventually bought the company for 65p per share. Taking up the rights would have meant investing more money, which breaks the £500 experiment. I have therefore modelled a holder who did not add capital but retained the economic value of the rights instead. That produces a rough final result of £250, rather than the misleading £60 or so you get by simply multiplying the original number of shares by the eventual takeover price.

There is a useful lesson in that too. “I bought it and never traded it” does not necessarily mean nothing happened.

What if I had just used a savings account?

This is where it got more interesting.

I ran the same contribution dates through two cash scenarios. The first uses the Bank of England’s quoted instant-access deposit rate series as a representative mainstream savings benchmark. The second is deliberately more demanding: it assumes I was the sort of saver who regularly moved the money to competitive best-buy easy-access accounts as rates changed.

The second comparison is probably closer to what somebody means when they say, “I could have just put it in a high-interest savings account”, but it is important to recognise that it is not completely passive. You would have had to keep an eye on rates and switch accounts when better ones appeared.

Using the same 18 £500 contribution dates gives this:

Approach Money put in Approx. value by late July 2026 Approx. gain
Representative instant-access savings £9,000 £10,089 £1,089 (+12.1%)
Diligently chasing strong easy-access rates £9,000 ~£11,848 ~£2,848 (+31.6%)
Stocks, looking only at prices / exit values £9,000 ~£11,500 ~£2,500 (+28%)
Stock picks with distributions and corporate actions reflected £9,000 ~£16,042 ~£7,042 (+78.2%)

That changes how I look at the original experiment.

If I had ignored dividends and simply compared the share prices with a good savings account, all that additional company-specific risk, several near-total losses and one actual zero would have produced a result that was no better than diligently moving the money between decent savings accounts.

The investment portfolio only really pulls away once the cash those businesses returned to shareholders is included and put back to work.

Doing nothing is not really one strategy

There are at least three different versions of “doing nothing” hiding in this comparison.

Leaving money in an ordinary instant-access savings account required almost no attention, but produced the weakest result. Regularly finding a better savings rate still involved no investment risk, but it did require some maintenance and did significantly better.

Buying the shares and refusing to trade them involved much more risk. Several individual £500 positions were almost wiped out and iRobot actually was. Yet leaving the winners alone and reinvesting the income meant a handful of companies had enough time to do most of the work.

Glencore alone ends up representing more than a quarter of the measurable portfolio. Add Barclays, Burford and ITV and four companies account for well over half of its value.

That is not evidence that I was secretly a brilliant stock picker. Quite a lot of the table strongly suggests otherwise.

It is a demonstration of how uneven long-term investment returns can be. You do not need every decision to be right if the winners are allowed to keep compounding, but concentration also means the outcome can depend enormously on a small number of companies.

There is another benchmark missing here too. A diversified low-cost index fund would have been a much more conventional way to invest passively than picking 19 individual shares and forgetting about them. That deserves its own comparison rather than being squeezed into this one, because I suspect it may be the most useful benchmark of all.

So, how badly did I do?

Not terribly, as it turns out, although the answer is much less flattering if I pretend dividends never happened.

The measurable £9,000 of hypothetical stock purchases becomes roughly £16,000 once distributions are accounted for, compared with around £11,850 for a fairly diligent high-interest cash saver using the same contribution dates.

The difference is about £4,200 in favour of the shares.

But the stocks came with a completely different experience. There were huge drawdowns, businesses that disappeared, a 100% loss, rights issues, takeovers, mergers, currency exposure and a very lopsided dependence on a few winners. The savings account did none of that.

That, to me, is the useful bit of finding this old page.

The question is not simply whether shares beat cash. Over long periods you would generally expect riskier assets to offer the possibility of higher returns. It is seeing what actually creates those returns, what happens when you leave things alone, and just how much difference reinvesting the boring bits can make.

The original Stocks-up page said I was about £3,800 in profit the last time I bothered calculating it.

I then appear to have stopped checking.

Perhaps that was not the worst instinct I had.

Method and sources

This is a retrospective personal experiment, not investment advice. Figures are approximate and are shown before personal tax, dealing charges and other individual costs. The stock figures use the original dates from my Stocks-up page and a late July 2026 valuation point.

For continuously listed dividend-paying companies, historic adjusted-price data is used as a practical total-return proxy. This assumes distributions are reinvested and is not intended to recreate the exact price or timing a broker’s dividend reinvestment service would have achieved. Glencore was modelled separately from its distribution history because its pattern of returns of capital makes the simple adjusted-price approach less satisfactory.

The savings comparison compounds gross interest using the same original contribution dates. The representative benchmark is based on the Bank of England’s household instant-access deposit series. The higher-rate scenario is an approximate reconstruction from contemporary best-buy savings rates and assumes regular switching to competitive easy-access products. Neither side includes personal tax.

Useful source material: