Market Update - February 2013

January brought with it some bumper stock market gains. The FTSE100 rose by 6.4% which is the best performance for this month since 1989. Will the old adage - 'As goes January, so goes the year.' prove correct for 2013? Fingers crossed!

My personal portfolio has performed very well. Leading the pack has been my sector bet on the house builders (Barratt/TaylorWimpey/Persimmon/Redrow/TelfordHomes), which have more than doubled now since purchase. The reason I bought these holdings was that they were all trading at a significant discount to Net Asset Value (NAV). With the exception of Barratt this is no longer the case so I'm starting to think about a possible exit strategy from these companies should they rise much higher.

Lloyds Banking group have also risen quite a bit over the last few months, they are making good progress repairing their balance sheet and deleveraging to meet the new banking criteria. I'm confident that once the PPI mess has blown over that this company will return to a healthy profitable situation and drag the share price up at the same time.

My last purchase back in September of Fidelity's Special Situations China fund has done very well, rising from 75p to around 95p, a gain of almost 30% in under 5 months. I may add to this position soon if the price remains below 100p.

My other holdings have generally risen with the tide, apart from BG Group which has been suffering quite a bit from various set backs (down about 10% from purchase price) and a few others like Vodafone, Astra Zeneca and Polo Resources that seem content to tread water for the time being.
Notably Tesco are making a decent recovery after taking a bit of a hammering early in January last year.