What a mixed year this has turned out to be for Shares’ best ideas for 2024.

That our one star turn stock was an annuities and lifetime mortgage specialist, even if it was ‘screamingly cheap at its current price’, as we originally noted, and the supposedly exciting tech growth picks have been dull-to-dismal, might make you hark back to school days studies of Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down.

What it also tells us is that a well-run company whose stock looks anomalously cheap can be a very compelling combo for investors. Just Group (JUST) can hardly be called exciting, with a mission statement to provide competitive products, financial advice and guidance to people in later life, yet the share price performance has been spectacular, up 91% on the original 84.9p share price, driven by short-to-long-run drivers as our nation’s over-65 population keeps on growing.

We did garner some success from the global AI boom, albeit from the more left-field RELX (REL), which is doing a super job at integrating this emerging technology into the large datasets it analyses for clients across a range of sectors. How that contrasts with our MongoDB (MDB:NASDAQ) selection, also a business that is all about massive datasets; managing, analysing and drawing valuable insights from it.

We know that data is AI’s rocket fuel yet rocket fuel isn’t much good if you don’t have a match to ignite it, and MongoDB has certainly lacked any sort of spark this year. In fairness, we did say that it was a ‘higher risk play’, and it has struggled to capture it’s expected share of the AI capex boom amid more cautious spending by corporate IT departments. A demonstration that picking stocks for the next 12 months is always going to be a challenge.

Staying with the tech theme, we have come to understand this year that turning AI potential into profit and hard cash will be a longer, bumpier road for many applications firms than we originally anticipated, illustrated by graphic design tools platform Adobe’s (ADBE:NASDAQ) uninspiring stock performance through 2024.

We are, arguably, most shocked by the disappointment that B&M European Value Retail (BME) has delivered. It is surprising that in a higher interest rate environment off the back inflationary spikes that a discount retail business has continued to get the cold shoulder from investors, especially given the relatively resilient operating performance it has delivered.

Our bet on consumers being attracted to Hollywood Bowl’s (BOWL) value-for-money leisure and entertainment offering has stood the 12-month test well, with its carefully managed expansion story still very popular with customers and investors alike, even if the shares have struggled to regain May’s 350p highs.

There were solid performances from oil engineer Hunting (HTG), despite a second half slide, biotech Puretech Health (PRTC) and reinsurer Conduit (CRE), while the hoped-for recovery at Smith & Nephew (SN.) didn’t come through.

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