Gray’s Investment Blog was my first foray into the world of professional writing. I set it up by chance in 2008 while studying a degree in finance and investment management at Northumbria University. I needed some inspiration to keep me researching the stock markets, and this became that inspiration. I would post all my research and analysis on the companies that interested me.
I also invested my student loans into the stock market, £7000, and managed to transform at £7000 into £50,000, all of which I documented.
The most successful and followed part of my blog was ‘Gray’s Stocks to Watch’, where I posted the names of the stocks and shares that were of most interest to me, when the prices were of most interest to me, along with blog posts in which I explained my reasoning.
Over the three year period I ran the blog, I added 65 stocks to Gray’s Stocks to Watch, 52 of which showed profits, leading to a cumulative return for the period of 397.5%.
In terms of viewership numbers, at its peak, I regularly received 2,000 to 5,000 unique reads per post (through Stockopedia, where I was a top contributor, some posts combined viewership was over 10,000).
I also had research posted directly onto the websites of a good number of companies who had values ranging in the multi-hundreds of millions of pounds. And through Stockopedia my articles were streamed on Bloomberg’s news feed, along with Google News UK, News Now, and Yahoo finance amongst others.
In 2010, my blog was rated for a short period by Alexia as being in the top 50,000 sites in the UK, a feat I am most proud of considering I only posted at most two to three times a week.
The reason the blog ended was down to a mixture of my wrist injuries and a desire to follow a different career path as a fiction writer.
For anybody interested, these are the yearly returns from Gray’s Stocks to Watch:
2008 (Last three months only)
FTSE Allshare = -11.05%
Grays Stocks to Watch = 11.85%
Return over market = 22.9%
2009
FTSE Allshare = 24.96%
Grays Stocks to Watch = 98.64%
Return over market = 73.68%
2010
FTSE Allshare = 13.57%
Grays Stocks to Watch = 111.37%
Return over market = 97.8%
These results yielded a combined three year total of 397.5% against the FTSE All Shares 26.2%, yielding a return over the market of 371.3%.
That means if £100,000 had been invested in September 2008, over the three-year period, by following my blog recommendations, a person’s portfolio would have increased to £497,540, while if a market tracker had been invested in, it would only have been worth £126,200. That is a return of £397,540 versus a return of £26,200 for the market tracker.
The above all uses a weighted average, so it imagines all investments would have had a similar amount invested into them. By favouring some stocks over others, a higher yield could have been returned, which is how I turn 7000 and 50,000.
I still invest in the stock markets to this day, and have been a private investor my entire adult life. I would say my investment philosophy is a mixture of value investing, and paying a fair price for a great business. I especially love businesses with a global product that has the power to have exceptional growth, and that has a very strong moat.
If you don’t know what that means, it means have always been a fan of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham, but also of Jim Slater. I don’t mind paying a top price if I’m getting a top company that I truly believe in, but I much prefer paying a fair price for that top company. Better yet if I can get it on the cheap, as then the margin of safety is even greater.
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