Hot stocks or hard knocks: Which publications had the most successful stock tips in 2024?

Want to know which share tips are worth listening to? And which economic forecasters are best left ignored?

In an industry first, Investing Insiders have identified the financial experts that it pays to put your money behind. Check out our 2024 independent analysis of almost 500 share tips from 11 investing websites and platforms.

Share tips, sometimes known as stock recommendations, are a common feature on many financial websites and investment platforms. They tend to consist of buy/hold/sell recommendations on a specific stock from analysts and experts from specific investment websites or platforms. The general idea is to help retail investors better navigate the complex investing landscape by providing share tips that will benefit their overall portfolios.

At Investing Insiders, we understand that investors often refer to these share tips to make their investments. However, not all share tips are made with the same risk tolerance and investment horizon in mind. Plus, it can be challenging to determine the legitimacy and effectiveness of these recommendations, especially over the long term.

As such, our team decided to track and monitor the share tips provided by the UK's top investing websites and platforms and measure their overall performance. After all, there's not much of a point in taking share tips if they end up underperforming the overall stock market, and you end up racking up tons of extra costs when you could've just invested in an index tracker fund instead.

To measure the performance of each share tip accurately, we employ a straightforward methodology. Quite simply, we record the closing share price of the share on the day the share tip was made. If the share tip is made over the weekend or bank holiday, the next business day's closing price is used. From there, the performance of each share tip is essentially the difference between that price and the closing price of the stock today or when the analyst, platform, or website recommends selling the stock.

It's crucial to note that the performance measured does not account for dividends. Therefore, returns are not accumulative, and actual returns may be higher than the figures presented.

Aside from that, when calculating each investing website's or investment platform's average performance, we use the median average return from all of its share tips rather than a mean average. This is because the median is less susceptible to extreme outliers, as it represents the middle value of the dataset, providing a more robust measure of central tendency. By using the median average, our calculations effectively mitigate the impact of any outlier share tips, resulting in a more accurate representation of a platform's overall performance.

Nonetheless, it's important to remember that past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns. The stock market, as well as the performance of individual shares, is inherently unpredictable, and even the most successful share tips may experience periods of underperformance.

Ultimately, our aim at Investing Insiders is to provide investors with objective data to help them make informed decisions. Investing always carries risks, and we encourage individual investors to always conduct their own due diligence before acting on any share tips or recommendations.

The data in the above graphs include the latest performances of 11 of the UK's most renowned financial websites and investment platforms which are known to give share tips. Performance figures are updated weekly.

The data, however, is relatively new as the dataset only goes back to January 2024, when we first started to compile the share tips. But given that investing should be for the long term, we plan to continue tracking these share tips for the months and years to come.

Which share tips are selected for the dataset?

Only share tips that are exclusively equities and listed on the London Stock Exchange as well as the New York Stock Exchange are included in the dataset.

Mutual funds enable you to pool your money with other investors to ‘mutually’ buy stocks, bonds, and other investments. They are run by professional money managers.Mutual funds, ETFs, cryptocurrencies, options, and any other security types outside equities are excluded from the data set. For example, Vanguard's FTSE 100 Acc. ETF is excluded as it's a culmination of shares within a fund.

What fees are included in the performance data?

The performance data quoted is not inclusive of any fees. This means that fees such as an investment platform's annual management fee, commission fees, FX fees, and any other fees may have an impact on the final return of a share.