As the final blog post before Xmas, I thought it would be useful to do a quick review of the past year. I have not yet done a detailed review of my investment portfolio performance over the year as I do that after the 31st December, but on a quick look at my net worth, I think it’s been a good year. With the bounce in the stock market after the Conservative General Election victory, most investors should be well ahead this year. The FTSE All-Share is up 13% at the time of writing, with the FTSE-250 up 25%. AIM stocks had a relatively poor year, rising only 8% but ones I hold generally jumped up at the end of the year as UK small cap stocks were suddenly seen to be relatively cheap.
The focus this year though was certainly on technology stocks – internet and software companies, both small and large which continues the recent trend. Will that continue for the coming year? I never like to predict market or economic trends, but there was an interesting article by Megan Boxall in the Investors Chronicle this week. It pointed out how the tech sector has outperformed the US market in 2019. Is this another dot.com bubble? She suggests not as companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Netflix, Adobe, Apple and Microsoft are all highly profitable.
But she does warn that regulators are getting twitchy about the dominance of these companies. For example Google (Alphabet) is now so dominant in web advertising that the competitors are nowhere. They have become the gorilla in the marketplace as companies are bound to want to advertise with search engines that have the most users. Could some of these companies be broken up by US regulators or attacked by the EU as is already happening? Microsoft was of course the subject of an antitrust law suit alleging a monopoly and anti-competitive practices back in 2000, but escaped from any severe penalties or break-up and the case also took years to resolve so I doubt that other tech companies are likely to be badly damaged by any such law suits. But the settlement and some mis-steps by Microsoft did enable newer companies to grow into the size they now are.
Two areas that I am positive about are fintech and biotech, although the latter seems to have had rather a flat year as valuations became too optimistic and concerns grew about drug pricing regulation. Fintech, i.e. the enabling of innovative payment and banking systems, still looks a field where a lot of growth is likely and where there are a myriad of new or early-stage companies bidding to conquer the world. There is though a great danger in following such trends and accepting the hype that is given out by promoters of such companies – a lot of them will prove unsuccessful or never develop a profitable business model, and many of the shares in the good companies are wildly over-priced.
Housebuilding companies and estate agents have jumped up on hopes that the Conservative victory will lead to a recovery in confidence by house buyers. Even ULS Technology (ULS), one of my worse investments during the year and focused on property conveyancing, has risen by 50% since the low at the start of December. Does this mark a revival in the housing market and another golden era for housebuilders? I doubt it. The Government is undoubtedly keen to ensure more houses are built but house prices and the ability of buyers to afford them are driven by many other factors. With interest rates remaining at record lows, if the economy does pick up then interest rates might also rise. Readers need to be reminded that such low real interest rates are an exceptional phenomenon in historical terms. This anomaly surely cannot continue much longer.
Bearing that in mind, I won’t be investing in bonds or gilts in the near future as interest rates can surely only go one way and when rates rise, their prices fall.
Will the Conservative election victory and associated euphoria lead to a resurgence in business confidence, in more investment and hence in the growth in the UK economy? Perhaps, but there is still the potentially tricky issue of negotiating a free trade agreement with the EU over the coming year. That will likely mean the short-term euphoria will fade, as do most Santa Claus market bounces, in the New Year. But as with all market and economic forecasts, I could be wrong. So I will continue just to buy and hold well managed companies in growth sectors. That tends to mean small to mid-cap companies rather than mega-cap companies, although I do hold some investment trusts and funds that cover the latter. The managers of such funds are often closer to the market trends and the views of other investors than any private investor can hope to be.
It just remains for me to wish you a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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