Stocks and Shares ISA tables

Archaeologist

I'm thinking of putting some of my savings into a stocks and shares ISA but want to find out how they have performed recently before I choose one. Is there a table listing best and worst performers anywhere?

dunstonh

A stocks and shares ISA does not perform. The ISA is just a container for your investments. There are tens of thousands of investments you can put inside an ISA and an unlimited variation of mix and match.

If you put the same investment inside 10 different S&S ISAs you would get an identical return. The only difference is charges and what features/service they offer.

If you are talking about performance tables for investments rather than ISAs then that is not the way to pick investments. You need to look at how you want to invest first (shares, unit trusts/OEICs/SICAVs, Investment Trust, ETFs etc) and then decide where you want to invest and what investments you intend to use to meet your strategy. Then you look at what is available in those areas and compare costs and potential and then have a look at past performance.

You dont look at past performance to see what is best though as that only tells you what was best in a certain period of history. Take BP shares. in the last 12 months you would look at past performance in different periods and see that they were the worst performing share in one period but the best performing share in a different period. That doesn't tell you anything about why it was worst/best. Indeed, it shows that sometimes investing in the worst performing share/fund over a certain period can actually be the best thing as that can often be the best performing share/fund in a future period.

How did you want to invest?

Loughton_Monkey

Archaeologist wrote: »

I'm thinking of putting some of my savings into a stocks and shares ISA but want to find out how they have performed recently before I choose one. Is there a table listing best and worst performers anywhere?

By all means look at a table, but digest the comments of Dunstonh first. Looking at a site like Trustnet will adequately give you "The Archaeologist's View" to funds (in other words historic performance) which almost never correlates with future performance.

There, under the 'Unit Trust and OEICS' section will be the huge array of funds potentially available to you under ISA wrappers.