Stock market trends can be fickle friends, and so it has proved for my blue-chip momentum screen over the past three months. The screen had firmly aligned itself with the quality theme at its last outing in June. High-quality blue-chips formed the basis of its 'long' picks (the fastest rising 10 shares of the previous quarter) while the 'shorts' were dominated by value plays. Sadly for the screen, the market changed its mind about the price it was prepared to pay for quality in the period and also started to warm to the relative cheapness of value situations. But the stellar performance of one of the longs from three months ago (London Stock Exchange) bailed out the long portfolio as a whole (see below).
Q2 Momentum performance
| Longs | Shorts | ||
| Name | Price performance (15 Jun - 15 Sep 2019) | Name | Price performance (15 Jun - 15 Sep 2019) |
| Spirax-Sarco Engineering | -6.6% | easyJet | 13.6% |
| Halma | -0.5% | Centrica | -17.1% |
| Intertek | -2.8% | Imperial Brands | 10.1% |
| Experian | 2.5% | ITV | 20.0% |
| Unilever | -1.3% | The Royal Bank of Scotland | -1.7% |
| Smith & Nephew | 10.9% | Marks and Spencer | -5.1% |
| Rio Tinto | -7.2% | International Consolidated Airlines, S.A. | -0.7% |
| London Stock Exchange | 38.0% | Just Eat | 10.3% |
| InterContinental Hotels | -3.3% | Taylor Wimpey | 5.6% |
| Rightmove | -5.4% | Persimmon | 8.2% |
| Average | 2.4% | - | 4.3% |
| FTSE 100 | 0.3% | - | 0.3% |