Let the children play and profits may follow after

Child's Play

Emily Reece, six, making an early bid to be signed up to one of the august City fund manager's training schemes, has outperformed the market by more than 13 percentage points, thanks to two takeovers among her 10 tips.

An Abbey National shareholder was handed 31p per share when it was finally taken over by Santander in November and also now has a share in the Spanish bank, worth €9.13 (645p). And investors in Tibbett & Britten, the warehousing group, got 668p per share, all in cash, when the FTSE 100 logistics giant Exel snapped it up in June.

She also struck gold with the closed life insurance business Britannic and the IT security group nCipher. But not even the Reece family's vast weekly outlay at J Sainsbury could prevent the supermarket chain becoming Emily's one bum stock.

This year's under-age stock picker is Joseph, the son of Philip Thornton, our Economics Correspondent. The five-year-old, who prefers the nickname Jo-Jo, took a truly random approach to the task. With pen in hand, he exercised a broad brush, picking 10 stocks from across The Independent's two-page spread of share prices on 23 December.

Jo-Jo's go-go stocks are: Costain, a construction group; the South African computer services group Dimension Data; Linton Park, a producer of tea, coffee and fruit; Brewin Dolphin, the stockbroker; RPC Group, the packaging group; the Turkmenistan exploration group Dragon Oil; Surfcontrol, the spam-blocking software company; Chesnara, a closed life insurer; and the FTSE 100 giants Lloyds TSB and Hilton.

Jo-Jo's Mojo

• Brewin Dolphin
• Chesnara
• Costain
• Dimension Data
• Dragon Oil
• Hilton
• Linton Park
• Lloyds TSB
• RPC Group
• Surfcontrol