We had some feedback recently asking about the claim that I was the best stock picker at Southbank Research. So I figured today’s a good opportunity to quantify that.

It’s best done by winding back the clock…

I built my first PC when I was around 13. I’d always been fascinated with computers – what was happening in the box that delivered such wonder to the screen. By the time I hit puberty, I had the knowledge and skills to put one together myself.

Back then, the two names dominated the brain space of any gamer or computer “nerd.” Nvidia and ATI Radeon (ATI later became AMD). Their GPUs were critical to a “kick-arse” PC.

So as far back as the mid-90s, both companies were just there, always there, a key fabric of my formative years, long before I ever wrote a word or published advice about markets.

That’s an important point to make early on today, because technology isn’t something I studied later in life just to sound credible in a newsletter.

It’s part of my existence, the fabric of how my brain works.

So, when I look at a chip company, a robotics play, or an early AI stock, the pattern is often obvious to me in a way that just is and might not be so obvious to someone who isn’t such a native to these technologies.

Decades in the making

Take Nvidia.

In 2013 I put it in front of readers at a split-adjusted price of around 35 cents a share. It’s now trading at US$207. That’s a gain of more than 590 times your money.

AMD tells a similar story.

I recommended it in 2018 at just over US$20, well before the chip shortage and the AI build-out turned it into a household name. It’s now trading above $500, a gain of more than 24 times, with several follow-up calls since, adding even more on top.

In 2014, I wrote an essay about ARM for MoneyWeek magazine. It had just listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE):

[Its] approach to technology and innovation sets ARM apart from others. In a world where processors, sensors, and microchips outnumber people, the IP that ARM owns is an enormous advantage.

When I covered the stock, its market cap was less US$30 billion. Today, and now listed on the Nasdaq, ARM’s market cap is over US$309 billion.

None of these calls came down to luck. Both came from watching an industry I already understood from the inside and had tracked for over 20 years.

The same goes for robotics and self-driving cars.

I wrote about both for MoneyWeek years before either topic hit the mainstream press. I took my first ride in a self-driving car back in 2017.

This picture is me getting into the back of an Audi Q7 at CES in Las Vegas, January 2017.

See that on the side?

Audi AI.

And then over on the front, Nvidia.

This was more than six years before OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public.

Here’s something else…

A bit grainy, but over my shoulder is the IBM System Q, their quantum computer. Well, one of the previous iterations of quantum computers.

That photo was taken in 2020, long before quantum computing became a talking point on mainstream financial news.

One month earlier, December 2019, I’d recommended a stock, Archer Materials, an Australian-listed company developing a quantum computing chip.

We sold out of that position in August 2021 for a 1,875% gain.

Here’s the part most people miss…

To the average investor, these breakthroughs look sudden, and the stocks that rip higher look like sheer luck for the people who got there first. One day self-driving cars are science fiction, the next they’re picking people up in Phoenix and San Francisco.

One day AI is a research curiosity, the next it’s rewriting how office work gets done.

Quantum computing is pseudoscience until suddenly Google and IBM have 1,000 qubit machines.

But if you’ve had boots on the ground in the industry, you know it’s been a decade or more in the making every time.

Finding the right company is never easy, and getting the timing right is harder still. But recognising the shift before it’s obvious to everyone else is where the real edge lives.

Some life changers, some stinkers

When I go back through previous picks, there are plenty of big winners. Archer Materials, Nvidia, and AMD are just a couple.

And then…

I first recommended Bitcoin to subscribers when it was $1,000.That’s roughly 60 times your money today. At one point, it was more than 125 times. I was early to Ethereum with my readers too. Around US$35 I think. It’s now (even after a huge pullback) around $2,000.

There are loads of other crypto winners that returned more than 1,000%, from Harmony, Radix, Cardano, Decentraland, and Livepeer through to Filecoin, Chainlink, Powerledger, and Cosmos.

There were small cap stocks in overseas markets like Electro Optic Systems, Afterpay, Appen, CleanTeQ, and Droneshield that became large cap stocks. And every one of those returned over 1,000% from the first recommendation.

And there’s been large cap stocks that soared over 1,000% in a short burst. Like Micron, which we recommended in April 2025, when it was near US$60. And SanDisk in December 2025 after it had run hard, but still had another 1,000%-plus to go.

Even in the depths of COVID-19, when Rolls-Royce had just undertaken a rights issue in October 2020 and its stock price was languishing around 32p (the rights issue price)… I told my subscribers to take up the rights issue in full. Rolls Royce stock is now trading 42.8 times higher than it was almost six years ago.

Filtronic is another I was early on, first recommending it in July 2022 at a stock price of 14.5p. It’s one of the UK’s best performing stocks today with a stock price of around 250p.

This, of course, is not the extensive list of early calls. But it’s categorically more 1,000% winners than anyone else at Southbank.

And then there’s the longer list of triple figure winners.

Oklo, Hut8, Centrus, Warpaint London, Marstons, Equals, Astera Labs, Western Digital, Strategy, SiTime, D-Wave, Bellamy’s, Zip Co, Elixinol, Corning, Mobileye… there’s a lot more, but that’s the flavour of it.

But also…

I’ve had stocks tank completely. 90% falls (and larger). Some crypto just ceased trading and we wrote it off as a 100% loss, like TenX, EOS, and Ooki.

We lost over 90% in stocks like Cyngyn, Saietta Group, Mode Global, Gfinity, EQTEC, and even Aston Martin Lagonda. We did our dough to the tune of 86% down.

IQE is another.

It’s seen a huge lift in price over the last six months, now up over 560%! I first recommended IQE in February 2021.

When I recommended it, as a play on the huge shortage in semiconductors, and the world’s insatiable appetite for semiconductors, I said…

I’m recommending to you one of Britain’s most promising semiconductor companies as “chipageddon” sets in and creates immense demand for semiconductors globally.

Talk about being right thematically…

But at the completely wrong time!

In February 2021, IQE was trading at 77p. At the end of 2025, IQE was at 5p. That’s a 93.5% fall. Even now, it’s still only at 47p.

This proves you can be right on the idea, but sometimes too early for your own good.

And being too early means that plenty of my calls have been absolute stinkers.

But asymmetric investing is never about being right all or even most of the time. It’s about making sure your losers cost you a quid (so to speak) while your winners pay back five, 10, or a 100 times that.

Worst case, you lose what you put in.

Best case, one position changes your year.

If you’re allocating capital to every trade like it has to be a winner, then you’re not doing this kind of investing properly.

We also use stop losses where appropriate, trailing our winners higher, and cutting away our losers. That kind of shrewd stock management often ensures you’re not completely getting “rekt” as you’d say in the crypto markets.

So yes, I’m comfortable saying that I’m the best stock picker at Southbank when it comes to finding outsized returns. That’s what I specialise in. Asymmetric investing.

But is it “safe” investing? No. Not even close.

And is every pick one a winner? Absolutely not.

In fact, I can guarantee that if you’re with me long enough, you’ll have several losers in there.

But also, you will have a shot at the stocks that will give you a chance at life changing returns.

This isn’t an all-in strategy.

It shouldn’t be your entire portfolio (unless you’ve got an extraordinary appetite for risk).

But it is fun…

It is often rewarding…

And it’s one of the most exciting ways I know to invest in transformational technology.

Until next time,

Sam Volkering
Investment Director, Southbank Investment Research

PS If there’s one lesson from Nvidia, Bitcoin, AMD, and dozens of my biggest winners over the years, it’s this: The market always underestimates transformational technologies in their early days. Humanoid robots sound unbelievable today. So did AI, self-driving cars, and quantum computing when I first wrote about them. James and I believe we’re approaching another one of those moments right now. See why we think one tiny supplier could sit at the centre of Tesla’s Optimus ambitions here.