A 916.67% investment gain in one year might be difficult to get your head around — but it is the best annual share performance of any company listed on the NZX in the last 10 years.
The New Zealand stock exchange has provided data showing the most significant on-year movements over the past decade.
The data assumes net dividends are reinvested and adjusts for capital events.
Pacific Edge’s share price increased 916.67% in 2020. It started the year at 12c and ended it at $1.22.
It has since fallen away again, to 10c.
“It’s important to look at everything in context,” Devon Funds head of retail Greg Smith said.
“While it had a big run in that particular year, look at the bigger picture and it’s lost 99% of its value from the peak. It was a big-sized company at its peak, and now it’s like a penny stock.”
He said growth stocks were popular during the pandemic when interest rates were low.
“They made progress with clinical trials — that often happens with biotech companies, they make progress and there’s reaction in the share price. There were probably macro and micro drivers of that one.”
Serko was second, with a 655.17 gain in 2017. It rose from less than 30c at the start of the year to about $2.20 at the end.
The price continued to rise to about $7.85 towards the end of 2021, before falling away again.
“The business was going pretty well, that was reflected in the share price,” Smith said.
“Scroll forward and they got hit during Covid and have started to make a bit of a comeback now. Digitisation trends, and they were a winning business as it were.”
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