10 years of investing in FTSE100
Most investing advice is that you need to diversify your investments as much as possible. 1 way of doing this is to invest in funds, but funds can either be cheap and cheerful tracker funds (which track the good with the bad) or managed funds that tend to be expensive and rarely have better performance over the long term than tracker funds.
As an investor, you're really looking for investment returns of 7% or above, but that is difficult for most investors to achieve as there is a tendency to trade too often.
Looking at the FTSE 100 investments over past 10 years, only approximately the top 25% of stocks would have returned you >7% p.a during that period
Check out the Winners and Losers
If you want to perhaps tilt the odds slightly in your favour then getting a feel as to what might move stock prices is a worthwhile endeavour.
You can use the stock plot to investigate annual returns for the last 10 years for FTSE 100 stocks currently. The advantage that the app provides over Yahoo Finance is that you can compare and contrast multiple stocks at once.
What moves stock prices is tricky which is why diversification is key. Eventually, so the theory goes, stock prices reflect fundamentals but eventually can be a long time and a poor stock in a popular market can do better than a jewel in a poor market.
For fundamentals, you can check out Guru Focus which takes the approach of comparing country markets with the performance of their respective economies. Kind of works for markets where the majority of the companies trading are focused domestically but larger companies in major markets trade globally so are less influenced by their economies. That said investors still don't often get that and sentiment weighs on a market if country news is bad.
