UK stocks will bounce back – make sure your portfolio is adequately positioned

UK stocks are more unloved than they’ve ever been. When they recover – and they will – they will move quickly so you need to have positioned your portfolio accordingly. Merryn Somerset Webb explains what to buy.

London Stock Exchange © Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Everybody hates UK stocks. But they won't always hate them.
(Image credit: © Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

Back in 2015 the FTSE 100 hit 7,000. It was quite exciting. Today the FTSE 100 is 5,876. Not so exciting.

Shares in some of our flagship companies look awful. Rolls-Royce hit a 17-year low this week. Royal Dutch Shell is down 60% this year alone. Things haven’t been quite so awful across the board – the FTSE 250 is roughly unchanged overall since 2015, but it is still down 21% this year.

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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.