who were the big hitters of 2024?

When asked to explain his baseball prowess, legendary batter Wee Willie Keeler told others “to hit ’em where they ain’t”. The winner of the 2024 FT Money stock picking contest, Alex Khan, took that advice to heart. He placed his bets where few rivals dared tread. His five-stock portfolio, evenly weighted, soared 393 per cent. No one else came close.

The FT’s annual contest pits the expertise of FT writers, including specialists on the equities market, against readers, many of whom dug out lesser-known, small companies which offer an attractive narrative.

Our 1,364 contestants in this fantasy, both readers and FT writers, chose five stocks, and could go long, or short, in any or all the positions. The portfolio was equally weighted, without concern for currency movements or dividends. No ETFs were allowed.

If that sounds a bit nuts, it’s meant to be. Such a super concentrated portfolio would not suit most professional investors. Instead, this exercise is meant to offer a bit of fun. The only prize is pride in beating a group of committed contestants, not to mention quite a few FT scribes — and a tour of the newspaper’s HQ in London.

For Khan, it’s not just a game, though: he owns the stocks he put forward. As he puts it: “I am a forever investor and an owner of a stock for the long term (not a renter). I prefer when a company grows and does what it promises and the stock price rises as a natural result.”

What kind of year was 2024? It was not a year to hedge, nor one for holding large, well-known companies. Going long on small capitalisation, thematic bets worked best — 2024 was a year for the hitters.

As an indicator, the US benchmark S&P 500 index managed a very respectable 19.3 per cent, without counting dividends. That return was in the 33rd percentile among this peer group, hardly terrible for an institutional portfolio manager.

But for our winners, a portfolio of high-beta small companies, highly sensitive to overall market returns, worked much better. At the other end of the list, about 38 per cent lost money in a year when buy and hold generally worked.

A lot of the short sellers were incinerated by some white hot rallies. In the real world, legendary short sellers Jim Chanos and Hindenburg Research’s Nathan Anderson called it quits in the past year, too. Anderson described his task as “rather intense, and at times, all-encompassing”.

Both surrendered to the stock market stampede. Those who bet against companies — such as Tesla or Nvidia — suffered badly. These two were by far the most popular shorts among our players.

Of the big hitters, Khan stood out with two huge winners — Rigetti Computing and IonQ, both involved with quantum computing — which were held by very few (if any) of the competitors in the field. Another Khan bet was Rocket Lab USA, a SpaceX wannabe, again not widely held.

As usual, timing is all. Interest in all things to do with quantum computing, AI and related technologies pushed up share prices to silly levels in the last quarter of the year. The fact that Rigetti leapt 1,300 per cent, mostly at year’s end, made the difference for Khan who now lives in the UK.

He stood out in other ways, too. He doesn’t care for cryptocurrencies and had nothing related to this market in his holdings. One technology which he believes will be disruptive and transformative is quantum computing, which made up two of his five picks. “As far as I am concerned, quantum computing will be bigger than the internet.”

Having worked in the US, he admires that country’s strengths and had no concerns with concentrating his investments there. Indeed, his only European holding, Germany-based Lilium Air, an electric jet developer, fell last year.

Khan began as a private client broker, initially with a UK-based Merrill Lynch HSBC joint venture. Later he worked in America for other firms. He has since focused on the US for his investment ideas. A fan of Warren Buffett, Khan eschews stock tip sites such as the Reddit sub-thread Wall Street Bets. Instead he buys and holds, including all of the stocks he put up for this competition. As he says: “I don’t follow any stock tippers. I was one!”

Khan opts for a bottom-up approach on stock picking, but within larger popular themes. How does he screen out his picks? Key investment criteria for him include the company having minimal debt, plus enough cash to operate for at least three years. He also seeks those with a talented, charismatic founder or chief executive, preferably with a disruptive technology or competitive advantage.

In contrast, runner-up Iain Todd, who works in the UK pharmaceutical industry, admits his personal investment style does not reflect the relatively aggressive holdings of his second-placed portfolio, up more than 212 per cent. He thus did not have his money in these companies.

Leading his picks was SoundHound AI, which produces automated responses for customer call centres. Again, not only was his choice a great one — it soared 978 per cent — he also managed to find a winner which almost none of his rivals had. Unfortunately, some of his other picks let him down, including the lung cancer detection hopeful Cizzle Biotechnology.

Only one other contestant chose SoundHound AI, and that was our third placed finisher Bhavin Bhatt, also based in the UK. That one pick helped him achieve a 209 per cent gain, just off second place. Unlike Todd, he has put his money to work on that and his other picks. While he had one big US technology winner, he then chose to spread his bets among diverse sectors in the UK market.

His next placed winner, cyber security group Darktrace, might have performed much better by the end of the year. Instead, he felt it was acquired cheaply by private equity group Thoma Bravo. His other UK tech play, Cab Payments, fell during the year.

Both left him bitter about the potential for UK equities. He now sees the UK as a short-selling heaven. “The UK stock market remains broken. There are no incentives for smaller investors,” he laments.

What about those so-called experts? What began as an in-house FT competition years ago may have spread to our readership, but any internal rivalry has not dissipated. Among the editorial staff, the champion stock picker for the second year running was our UK news editor Kadhim Shubber who produced a very respectable 137 per cent return, 12th among all contestants.

Regardless of the editorial team’s cautious view towards cryptocurrencies, Shubber chose to go his own way and profited, embracing US software group and bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy. This soared 468 per cent. Shubber’s top three included Coinbase, a gutsy call given how well it did in 2023.

Moreover, he predicted all of this last year, as noted in the write up: ‘I thought that bitcoin is the future and therefore I wanted to put all my eggs in the bitcoin basket’, he said, with tongue in cheek. He promised to stick with exactly the same strategy for his 2024 picks. And that’s exactly what he did.

After last year’s great run, has he been humbled by the fortune bestowed by the market gods? Not at all.

“People say that past performance is no guarantee of future results, but those people have not yolo’d (you only live once) into crypto two years running in the FT’s stock picking competition. I look forward to sharing my insights with you again this time next year.”

Regardless of this achievement, he did not top the FT’s leaderboard. That honour went to staffer Radu Josan who deserves a hat tip as he came in fourth among all contestants with a 191 per cent gain. He too had his money in the game, owning his top three: MicroStrategy, Palantir — the data-sifting software group controlled by Peter Thiel — and Coinbase.

And what about those at the other end of the table? To spare any blushes, we won’t disclose those readers with the biggest amount of egg on their faces — mostly done by shorting high flyers among the “Magnificent Seven”. There were some notable short ideas that did well. While Rocket Lab USA nearly quintupled, Virgin Galactic crashed 84 per cent. But at the very bottom of the table, short positions on MicroStrategy appear frequently.

Unfortunately, one of the five worst performers overall was Katie Martin, the FT’s market columnist. Her portfolio fell 127 per cent, not helped by her bet against MicroStrategy. None of her three long positions could come close to offsetting its powerful leap. Only one of those, Microsoft, went up.

“God, what an absolute train wreck,” says an abashed Martin. “The worst thing is that I never learn — I’ve shorted Tesla before and been hammered on it, and for some reason I thought I’d try it again.”

Stock picking contest 2025 rules

• You must pick individual stocks listed on a major stock market. 

•  The winner is the portfolio that generates the highest overall return by December 31 2025. 

•  If there is a fine margin between the two top entries we will add dividends to the long returns, and subtract them from the shorts.

•  Currency movements are not taken into account.

•  If your company is taken over, you take the price at which it is trading at the end of the period, or the final price if it is delisted or suspended.

The three readers whose portfolios perform best will be invited for a tour of the FT’s offices in London early in 2026. Good luck!

You can enter the competition here. For full rules, terms and conditions, see https://help.ft.com/faq/legal-and-privacy/stock-picking-competition/

Never a fan of bitcoin, Martin hoped that 2024 would be her year. “The real damage obviously comes from shorting MicroStrategy. I figured 2024 would be the year it came unstuck, and/or that bitcoin would finally run out of buyers, and clearly I was totally wrong on both fronts. In fairness, I did think this was a death or glory trade. It just turned out that I picked death.”

Another notable loser among the FT columnists was consumer editor Claer Barrett. The culprit again was Tesla. “I was prepared to risk shorting [the] shares, but I reckoned without the US election. Would I short them again in this year’s competition? You bet!”

In last year’s contest, more than 60 per cent of portfolios generated a positive return, similar to 2023. Our league leaders not only avoided the pitfalls of shorting US megacap stocks, but also found those winners which few others held.

And let’s face it, our winners also benefited from a bit of good fortune, an end-year bull run in celebration of the coming Trump administration. Some of the winning holdings went up multiple times in December alone. By year end one might expect the Trump-era exuberance to have lost some of its vigour, perhaps giving all our 2025 contestants a chance at winning.