Powergen slipped out an announcement of an 8.9 per cent rise in bills between Christmas and the new year. nPower, however, yesterday said it would not increase prices this winter."We never want to raise prices but we have seen our gas costs continue at very high levels and we cannot resist that," the British Gas spokesman said. He added that there was a range of things customers could do to mitigate the effects of the price rise, including switching to payment by direct debit or evening out quarterly bills.In the three and a half years since the domestic gas market was opened to competition, 30 per cent of households have switched from British Gas. But the company said that over the same period it had also won back 2 million customers who had switched. "That demonstrates we are providing something that people want," the spokesman added..

The past 12 months have been a roller coaster ride for the UK stock market and there have been spectacular individual winners and losers along the way. Marconi came close to collapse, while Marks & Spencer staged a share price recovery that surprised virtually everybody. And we return to some of these today together with an updated recommendation.Man Group is a company that came from nowhere during the course of 2001 and ended the year as a FTSE 100 star. The former commodities broker reinvented itself as a hedge fund manager and found itself beautifully in tune with the bear market. With the ability to short sell as well as offer a balance of bonds and currencies, Man found funds flowing into its coffers as fast as it disappeared from those of conventional fund managers. We recommended Man Group as a buy in July when the share were 924.6p and had already enjoyed a staggering run. That run continued taking the stock up to 1,335p in December.With the shares now at 1,172p there is a strong argument for taking profits.

The bull case is that the hedge fund market is tipped to continue growing with some analysts saying they could soon account for 5 per cent of the market. There is therefore headroom for further gains but the safest option is to lock in some profits.We had mixed success with Vodafone. In January we said the shares were worth buying on the dips when they stood at 225p, which was then a 12-month low. Though we pointed out the exposure to a downturn and the questionable return on the 3G licence binge, we remained positive. Sadly the shares continued to fall hitting a low of 124p in the summer.We returned to the stock in August saying the shares looked cheap at 128p They have risen sharply since then and now stand at 177p.