New Year Naps - Top Stocks for 2025 with a segue to the QVM Portfolio

Happy New Year to all subscribers! While Santa has not brought his usual rally to UK markets over recent weeks, I do find myself optimistic for 2025. Everyone is miserable about the prospects for the UK economy, but all the doom and gloom seems priced in. The UK is cheap, and the smart money has been picking up bargains with one in twenty UK stocks receiving takeover bids through the year, and international investors circling. Good quality, value stocks have been appreciating and, aside from the dismal AIM, all the major FTSE indices rose in 2024. The NAPS Portfolio ended 2024 up almost 20% over the year, significantly beating its benchmark, the FTSE All Share, which managed 6%.

We’ve now completed a full decade of the NAPS Portfolio. It’s been a wonderful journey of rather lazy, but extremely effective investing. Ten years of applying this disciplined investment process have generated 13% annualised returns, beating even the Samp;P 500 by only investing in UK stocks. I wrote an extensive review with lots of data visualisation from this decade of outstanding returns, which you can catch up on here.