Investment extra: 2010 FTSE winners and losers

By Ian Lyall for MailOnline
Updated: 06:37 EDT, 20 December 2010

The Daily Mail's top share analyst has outperformed the market with his portfolio this year - and it has been an Xciting ride.

Day of reckoning: Investment Extra editor Ian Lyall

The day of reckoning has come. It is time to tot up just how the Daily Mail stock portfolio has performed in 2010.

The star performer is Xcite Energy, which continues to live up to its name.

Okay, the shares have come off the boil a little as its north sea drilling efforts have been hampered by the atrocious weather conditions and glitches with its equipment.

Nevertheless the stock has risen 432% since we said 'buy', back in April. On September 25 the advice was to set a trailing stop-loss (a trigger to sell that is re-set as the share price rises).

This would have kicked in at around 15% below the December 3 high of 333p, giving an overall return from Xcite 450%.

With the trailing stop-loss in place the overall gain from the portfolio this year would have been a bumper 42.3%. Without it, the return would have been several percentage points lower (see graphic).

Xcite had a dramatic effect on the portfolio's performance. Without it, the return would have been a measly 5.3%, which would have seen the Daily Mail portfolio of shares underperform the FTSE 100, our investment benchmark.

Unfortunately, we picked more losers than winners this year. However, the duds were quickly ejected by adhering rigidly to the stop-losses we set, which means their damage to the overall investment performance was minimised.

And where we won we won very big. Domino's Pizza is a case in point. It has risen 62% since it was added to the Mail's basket of top stocks.

Incredibly the company, which listed in 2004, is now worth £940m, valuing the chief executive Chris Moore's stake at £14.6m.

The biggest beneficiary of Domino's success has been businessman Nigel Wray, a very early backer of the company, who has an 11.4% slice of the shares worth £107m. And this was after selling two slugs of stock earlier this year for just over £26m.

Perhaps the most satisfying buy has been Cookson, which has gone up almost 40% in just three months as the market cottoned onto the fact it had been oversold.

Possibly the most frustrating investment was our first - Cable & Wireless. We bought the stock in January hoping to cash in on the demerger.

What happened, however, was we were left with shares in two underperforming companies - Cable & Wireless Communications and Cable & Wireless Worldwide.

We dumped the latter and kept the former, which just compounded our earlier mistake as CWC slid from 60.75p when we made the buy decision to 51.5p at the close of play yesterday.

With Cluff Gold and Pan African we really miss out on the gold rush which has seen shares in some of the more speculative explorers post triple-digit gains. However, both are sound, well-run companies that are actually producing and selling the precious metal rather than burning cash drilling holes in the ground.

The only one of the winners we've failed to mention thus far is aviva, which has returned a tidy 8% capital gain despite being our main income stock.

Moving into 2011, I'd say caution is the watchword. The peripheral economies of the eurozone still represent a major potential de-stabiliser, even after Irish bailout.

Meanwhile, inflation, higher interest rates and rising unemployed could act as a dampener on the UK economy. Whether this will then has a knock-on effect on the stock market only time will tell.