It picked up a chain of pubs during the year collecting new management in the process

It picked up a chain of pubs during the year, collecting new management in the process. It is in the stable of the Dublin entrepreneur John Teeling and has promising oil developments in Bolivia.Alvis is probably the most staid and longest established group in the top 20. This maker of armoured fighting vehicles has soared on the back of sharply higher profits from big overseas orders.The motley band of losers are spread over many industries, ranging from engineering to marketing. Mr Hemmings still has pubs in his private portfolio and the betting is they will be pumped into Farringford which had retained its quote through its ownership of a solitary hotel.Pan Andean Resources is the top performer on the Alternative Investment Market. He made his fortune, estimated at pounds 250m, from Pontins holiday camps, now owned by S&N.

Through his Northern Trust Co he built a significant stake in Farringford, which has been as high as 18p, and then arranged for it to manage 210 pubs owned by a company where he and S&N are shareholders. For years Farringford has sought a role, flirting with reverse takeover deals as directors came and went.Enter Trevor Hemmings, a director of the Scottish & Newcastle brewing giant. So is British Biotech, which has surged 233 per cent on cancer drug hopes. It is now valued at pounds 875m.Farringford's presence shows that even in these days of booming high technology stocks there is still money to be made in spotting old fashioned shell companies. In a year which has seen some remarkable displays the likes of Oxford Molecular and Chiroscience are to the fore. When first posted the offer valued Unipalm at pounds 97m; the closing price was pounds 152m. It was a splendid run for managing director Peter Dawe who likes to describe himself as a "failed accountant".

He left the company some pounds 36.4m richer.Not surprisingly bio-technology babes are well represented in the top 20. The rip roaring UUNet performance lifted Unipalm, giving a final offer value of around 740p, although the shares were squeezed up to 875p. As they surged so did Unipalm.An offer from Goldman Sachs of a low cost dealing facility in UUNet probably tempted some to accept the US group's shares rather than sell in the market. For UUNet is 15 per cent owned by Microsoft and suddenly the Bill Gates magic started to influence its shares. Unipalm slumped as speculators not wishing to suffer the problems of owning Nasdaq traded shares sold in the market But they quickly rued their haste. Then came an announcement bid talks were underway and the stock market excitedly anticipated an offer in the region of 700p.The offer, after weeks of uncertainty, materialised at nearer 450p - in the Nasdaq traded paper of bidder UUNet Technologies, a little known Virginia-based group.

Its shares bumped along around their placing level until April last year when its role as an Internet provider started to attract the more alert investor. Hope has, however, merely been deferred, Standard is regarded in some quarters as the hot tip for a bid this year.Unipalm came to market at 100p in March 1994. At the height of the banking takeover feast - which cost Kleinwort Benson and SG Warburg their independence - many a shrewd punter would have banked on Standard falling victim to a bid. P&O, afflicted by profit fears and dividend worries, is the worst performing Footsie stock with a 23 per cent decline.The regional electricity companies, which spent the year succumbing to takeover bids or offering unimagined rewards to their shareholders in a desperate attempt to keep the marauders at bay, failed to feature in the top 20.Best of the financials is Standard Chartered.

But, on the same yardstick, blue chip losses are much more comfortable. Indeed the best of the FT-SE 100 constituents, Dixons, which joined the index last week, managed a 131 per cent gain and Burton 98 per cent compared with the 178 per cent achieved by Coda, a computer group which emerged as the twentieth best performing share. It has the dubious distinction of suffering a 94 per cent decline.The list of the 20 best and worst performing shares once again underlines that it is down among the second-liners and obscure fringe stocks where the greatest ability to out or underperform lurks.Blue chips are conspicuous by their absence. Unipalm outperformed all other shares, surging 455 per cent to 650p. Nimble footed investors could have claimed even more from the Internet gateway company as the shares briefly stretched to 875p. At the other end of the scale is Ferrum, an engineer where a restructuring looks inevitable.