A fun Quartz article found that a portfolio comprised of U.S. companies whose names were all upper case (e.g. NVIDIA) had out-performed the S&P 500 Index in 2016. The article’s explanation: confident companies have confident names!
How would such a portfolio fare in the UK?
The following table lists the 14 FTSE 100 companies with (almost) all upper case names. Included in the table are the returns from the beginning of 2015.
| Company | TIDM | Rtn (from 2015) |
| BP | BP. | 39.9 |
| CRH | CRH | 36.8 |
| RSA | RSA | 31.2 |
| RELX | REL | 21.9 |
| DCC | DCC | 18.5 |
| HSBC | HSBA | 16.8 |
| FTSE 100 | UKX | 12.4 |
| WPP | WPP | 9.0 |
| BAE Systems | BA. | 8.2 |
| SSE | SSE | 3.3 |
| GKN | GKN | 1.8 |
| TUI AG | TUI | -15.0 |
| BT | BT.A | -17.8 |
| ITV | ITV | -38.4 |
And the following chart plots the performance of an equally-weighted portfolio of the 14 upper case companies benchmarked against the FTSE 100 Index.
As in the US case – it works!
Why do investors bother with anything more complicated?
