Tobacco stocks could damage your wealth

Tobacco stocks are all the rage with fund managers, who see them as solid, income-generating defensive stocks. But it's an industry in terminal decline, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

What are the 20 best stocks listed in the UK? It's the kind of thing you want to know before this year's deadline for choosing your individual savings account (Isa) holdings, isn't it? It's good news, then, that Socit Gnrale's Andrew Lapthorne has made a stab at figuring out the answer, by compiling a list of the most consistent shares over the past 20 years.

These he counts as the stocks that you could have bought in any month since 1993 and been certain to make a positive absolute return, had you held them for five years. To find them, he took all the stocks with a long enough trading history 329 qualified and ranked them every month on a five-year total return basis. All those with any negative returns were removed.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.