Scots schoolgirls beat experts on the stock market

AN ALL-GIRL team of Scots secondary school pupils has taken the top prize in a national investment competition, after making a near 30 per cent gain playing the stock market - a return that trumps a host of professional fund managers.

The four sixth-year pupils from Arbroath High School - Claire Cargill, 17, Elizabeth Gibson, 17, Luath Glendinning, 18, and Alanna Ferguson, 18 - turned 1,500 into 1,937.93, netting a 29.2 per cent rise over the course of the eight-month contest.

That far outstripped the lift in the index of Britain's listed companies - the FTSE All-Share climbed just 7.96 per cent over the same period - and was hailed "an outstanding performance" in tough market conditions.

Gavin Oldham, chief executive of retail stockbroker The Share Centre, which runs the annual "Shares4Schools" contest, told The Scotsman: "Many fund managers are benchmarked against the All-Share and try to achieve full-year performance of 3, 4 or 5 per cent over that, so would think they were doing very well to achieve 11 or 12 per cent."

Justin Modray, the head of communications at Bestinvest, believed the performance "should put some highly-paid fund managers to shame".

He said: "The girls at Arbroath High School have obviously been very canny at picking stocks.

"If they could continue this success, it would be mightily impressive: over the last five years only 4 per cent of fund managers in the UK All Companies sector have managed to beat the FTSE All-Share Index in each of those years."

The four achieved a 7.1 per cent advantage over Ewell Castle School, a private boarding school in Epsom, Surrey, which took second place.

It was streets ahead of bottom-placed Collyers College in Horsham, West Sussex, which saw its portfolio tumble by 63.4 per cent.

None of the Scots pupils had any knowledge of the stock market before embarking on the contest, entered by 33 UK schools.

Archie McInally, the principal teacher of business education at Arbroath, said: "The girls had no help other than from me and I don't have enough money to buy and sell shares. They've done this from scratch: it's been a massive learning experience."

He put their success down to planning and research - and their subsequent investment in the computer games firm Eidos.

After its shares dropped by more than half, the team put its entire portfolio in the firm (responsible for popular titles such as Tomb Raider), after correctly identifying it as a takeover target.

"We ended up selling for almost double and put all the money into blue chips. Then we sat biting our finger nails," said Mr McInally.

The girls, who are set to start university after the summer, will spend their profits during a trip to London, where they will be officially crowned as the 2004-5 winners.