Taunting the bear? The NAPS portfolio defies the worst quarter in years

If you’ve been reading the headlines you’d have heard it’s been the worst quarter in the stock market for years. Doom and gloom are the order of the day, Volkswagen’s been cheating, Commodities are slumping, China’s a goner and even the IMF are warning that we’re short on growth. In this environment even the most hardy could be excused for running for the stock market exits. But has it really been so bad? Let’s take a look through the lens of the two human scale portfolios I’ve been running using the Stockopedia ranking systems.Sleepy time… At the start of the year I very cautiously set out to illustrate how an investor could simply put together a broadly diversified portfolio using the Stockopedia StockRanks. I called this portfolio the “New Year NAPS Portfolio” as a reference to the common betting concept of a ‘nap hand’, but also alluding to the strategy’s soporific simplicity. The strategy selected the top 2 ranked stocks (using the StockRanks) above a £20m market cap from each of our 10 economic sectors. I theorised that such a portfolio, being broadly exposed to value, quality and momentum, ought to have a strong...