For Lansdowne Partners’ Peter Davies and Stuart Roden, 2013 was a year in which almost everything went right. Financial News has reviewed the pair’s 40-page end-of-year letter to clients and spoken to someone familiar with their thinking. Here are some of their key observations for 2014.

Successful bets on airlines and financials were among a range of positions that drove the veteran stockpickers' flagship Lansdowne Developed Markets fund to a gain of 33.1% last year. This beat the S&P 500 index with about a third of the net exposure. Despite rising equity markets, a substantial part of Lansdowne's outperformance came from its short book.