My 2020 year in review: The #CDM year

So first off I would say I’m not a professional trader, my aim each year is to beat the FTSE all-share index, that’s my baseline and apart from a couple of wobbles I’ve been succeeding in that.

This year really has been the year of getting back into the driving seat. I’ve had a couple of years off due to investing my money in other activities, buying a house, getting a kid etc. But my main aim this year was to get more solid around my strategy for spread betting (trying different strategies) as well as focusing more on removing some of the bad habits I know I have.

One of those habits I’m hoping will be resolved by this blog. I only started this blog a couple of weeks ago, it’s a combination of trading therapy and for me to track the decisions I’ve made and the lessons that I learn from them. I decided to do it publicly, not because I expect to get any readers but to put myself mentally in a place that I need to justify the trades and don’t go back and change the reasons for the trades and learning more from the trades.

My 2020 Investment Results in Numbers

So I have three main trading accounts that I trade from. SIPP is generally the more conservative and defensive stocks with my ISA a little more speculative and my spreadbet account. So totals for this year are:

ISA Account: +26.18%
Spreadbet: +16.68%
SIPP Account: +14.63%
Overall: +22.40%

Top Trade – Codemasters

Mark Slater gave a great interview on his round up of 2020. I’ve included the video above but he does go into his investment in CodeMasters (#CDM). At the time of writing CDM is currently in takeover talks with EA and CDM for me was by far my biggest success this year. Funnily enough, I had a similar strategy to him although I only bought into CDM in the early part of 2020. Mark’s fund held around 10% of the CDM stock and is by far the largest shareholder and after the first bid for CDM from Take-Two, his fund decided to take some profits. I did the same but not until after the EA bid at this point but I decided to sell 50% of my total stock in CDM.