The skill to buying fast-growing businesses is avoiding those stocks which not only burn brightly, but are liable to burn out. Unfortunately our high-growth small cap screen, which models the stock-picking philosophy of investment guru Martin Zweig, ended up selecting a number of companies which completely lost their growth trajectory in the last year, and one which was outed as a fraud.
This meant that for the first time in the four years we have been running our Small Cap Zweig screen, it failed to beat a hybrid benchmark of the FTSE Small Cap and Aim All-Share indices. In fact, the 17 shares which made last September's cohort failed by a country mile, posting a negative return of 16 per cent against an average gain of 9 per cent for the indices.
2015 PERFORMANCE