If two of the five fund managers have a particular stock in their top 10s, and one has 2% of their fund invested in it while the other has 4%, the manager average holding is 3%. Managers who do not have the stock in their top 10s are disregarded.

Our good investment guide: a shortlist of about 150 of the best funds, investment trusts and exchange traded funds (ETFs), divided into sectors to help you choose.

This is a measure of how much the fund managers like a particular stock. If managers are heavily overweight a stock (see below), it suggests they have a high conviction that the stock will do well. To find out how the conviction score is calculated read the FAQs.

The dividend yield on a stock is calculated by dividing the annual dividend payouts by its share price, so a company trading at 50p that pays out two dividends of 1p in a year will have a dividend yield of (2 * 1p) / 50p = 4.0%. Higher yielding stocks tend to be more mature companies that don't grow as fast, though this isn't always the case. The yields quoted on this page are historic, and offer only an indication of future yields.

The FTSE All-Share is an index made up of around 1,000 companies traded on the London Stock Exchange. It is often used as a benchmark (see above) against which fund managers' performance can be judged. The FTSE All-Share includes the FTSE 100 (often simply referred to as 'the FTSE'), which is an index of the largest 100 UK-based companies.

An investment fund – otherwise known as a unit trust or an OEIC (open-ended investment company, pronounced 'oik'), or 'mutual fund' in the US – is a way of pooling lots of investors' money together to be looked after by a professional fund manager (see below).

A fund manager is responsible for deciding what their fund (see above) should be invested in. The best fund managers, such as those found in Citywire Selection (see above), are often able to beat the market by carefully selecting the right stocks.

The difference in share price between two points in time, expressed as a percentage of the price at the start of the period, is referred to as growth. A stock trading at a share price of 50p a year ago, but which is now trading at 75p, has grown 50% in that time. A negative figure means the shares have fallen in value. The growth figures quoted here are capital return rather than total return, which includes dividends.

This is the number of fund managers, of the five, who have a given stock in their top 10 holdings.

If a fund manager is overweight a particular stock, it means they own more of it than the index they use as a benchmark (in this case the FTSE All-Share). So if a stock makes up 1% of the index, and a manager has 3% of his fund invested in the stock, he is 2% overweight. Underweight means the reverse. See also Conviction score, above.

The FTSE All-Share (see above) is market capitalisation weighted, meaning larger companies make up a larger proportion of the index. (Market capitalisation is calculated by multiplying the number of shares on the market by their price.)

Almost all the companies in Top Stocks have their primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and are constituents of the FTSE All-Share Index. However, some companies which are listed on overseas stock exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange have secondary listings in the UK – which means UK investors can easily buy their shares, but they're not considered part of the FTSE. If a UK fund manager invests in these overseas companies (the rules say up to 20% of their assets can be invested outside the UK) it suggests they're a fan – as such, we've assigned the maximum conviction score (see above) in these cases.

Stocks are grouped into sectors for easy comparison with their peers. In the Top Stocks context, 'sector' means industry sector, though in other contexts it could refer to larger company versus smaller company, or importers versus exporters for example. Economic factors will often affect different stocks in the same sector similarly – for example rising commodity prices is generally good for all mining stocks.

Though the words are often used interchangeably, stocks and shares actually have slightly different meanings. Shares are actual things representing part-ownership of a company, whereas 'stock' refers to those shares in the abstract. It's like the difference between buying 'milk', and buying 'two pints of milk'. Therefore 'stocks' in the plural refers to more than one company – you can 'buy shares in a company', you can 'buy stocks', or you can 'buy a company's stock', but you can't 'buy stocks in a company'. But don't worry if you forget the distinction – nobody really cares!