Should stock-picking columns be regulated?
- Robin Powell
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
A Sunday Times investment columnist celebrates a ten-bagger and declares stock picking alive and well. His own readers aren't convinced, and the evidence is firmly on their side. Is it time to hold media share pundits to the same regulatory standards as financial advisers?
Ian Cowie has been writing about his personal share portfolio in the Sunday Times for over a decade. His column is one of the most widely read investment features in the UK press. And his latest piece is a celebration: Apple shares he bought in 2016 for the equivalent of $24 have hit $256. A ten-bagger. Proof, he writes, that stock picking works.
But scroll down to the comments and you find something interesting. His readers aren't buying it. They want annualised returns. They want benchmark comparisons against the FTSE Global All-Cap or the MSCI World. They want the full track record, not the highlight reel. As one commenter, Alexandra Telnikoff, put it: "Anything else is basically hot air."
She's got 22 upvotes. And the evidence backs her up. Over the past 20 years, 94% of actively managed US funds have underperformed their benchmarks, according to the latest SPIVA scorecard. The pattern holds across markets, time horizons, and fund categories. The longer you measure, the worse it gets.
So when a newspaper columnist declares stock picking alive and well on the strength of one winning trade, you're entitled to ask: where's the rest of the story?
Where's the benchmark?
You can't claim stock picking works on your winners alone. You need the full portfolio, measured against what a tracker would have returned. Cowie gives us neither.
Horse racing tipsters publish their complete record — winners and losers. The Racing Post tracks it. Readers can check the strike rate. Nobody would take a tipster seriously if they only mentioned the horses that came in.
Stock-picking columnists play by different rules. Cowie names Apple, Microsoft, Polar Capital. What he doesn't show is how the whole portfolio has done against a global index. A ten-bagger means nothing if three other picks lost 80%. We've no way of knowing, because the numbers aren't published.
If Cowie were a regulated financial adviser, he couldn't get away with this. The FCA's COBS 4 rules require performance claims to be fair, clear, and not misleading — with a relevant benchmark included. Newspaper columnists are exempt because editorial content isn't classified as a financial promotion.
The people with the least accountability have the biggest audience.
The data is clear: almost nobody beats the market long-term
The evidence against stock picking is about as close to settled as anything in finance gets.
Start with the maths. Hendrik Bessembinder at Arizona State University examined every US stock listed between 1926 and 2016 — more than 25,000 of them. 4.3% accounted for all the net wealth created above Treasury bills. The other 95.7% collectively matched or trailed government bonds. Owning Apple was like winning a lottery and calling it a strategy.
And if professional fund managers with research teams and real-time data can't beat an index consistently, the odds for a newspaper columnist — or a reader following his tips — are tiny. Even Berkshire Hathaway trailed the S&P 500 over the two decades to 2022.
Stock-picking columns sell papers — but at whose expense?
These columns persist because they're entertaining, not because they're useful. "I turned $24 into $256" is a great story. "I bought a global tracker and left it alone for a decade" isn't — even though the second approach wins for most investors.
Cowie frames the rise of index investing as a Vanguard "marketing" success — as though the evidence base is a branding exercise. It isn't. Vanguard launched its UK direct-to-consumer platform in 2017 and had attracted more than 550,000 clients by 2023. That growth came from performance, low costs, and word of mouth — not advertising.
One of Cowie's readers, Tim Walsham, nailed it: "That isn't a very interesting article to write or read every Sunday. Instead we get stockpicking nonsense, encouraging the public to fly in the face of all of the evidence."
He's right. Which raises a fair question about responsibility.
If advisers must show their evidence, why shouldn't columnists?
Nobody's suggesting we ban stock-picking columns. But if you're going to tell hundreds of thousands of readers that stock picking works, you should have to show your workings.
Here's what that could look like. Publish your full portfolio returns, annualised, against a relevant benchmark. Do it every year. Let readers compare. That's the same transparency we already expect from every regulated financial adviser in the country.
The genre is fading for a reason. These columns were once a fixture of every weekend money section. Most have quietly disappeared, and the ones that remain feel like relics of a different era.
As Cowie's reader JB put it, newspapers "should be more transparent and empirical with regard to performance data." Ten recommends on that comment. The demand for accountability isn't coming from index fund companies. It's coming from readers.
What readers actually need
We wouldn't trust a racing tipster who gave us the odd anecdote about a losing bet but never published their strike rate. Stock-picking columns shouldn't get away with the same thing.
If Cowie genuinely believes his approach works, the fix is easy: publish the full record. Annualised returns, measured against a global index, updated every year. His readers are already asking for it.
And for anyone wondering whether "average" market returns are worth settling for — when that average beats more than nine in ten professionals over the long term, settling isn't the word I'd use.
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