Forum Archive Index - July 2001

["DR" <kat47@bigfoot.com>]

Here is an extract from a newletter that I get.

"Strategies
For anyone whose exposure to the stockmarket is limited to buying a tracker fund, this is extremely bad news. It is also bad news for anyone paying into a personal pension fund or for anyone with a mortgage backed by an endowment policy. So that's most of us then!

The partial good news is that the only way to make money in these circumstances is by employing what we and active investors like you specialise in - share selection. However, it is also now true that selection is not enough. For years, selection has been more important than timing but now it is increasingly the case that selection and timing are both essential.

That means you have to be much more alert than in easier markets - the buy and hold strategy is unlikely to work - and you have to adopt a shorter term trading mentality that looks to ride such long term rising trends as are still available but also attempts to trade successfully within those trends and the more common sideways ones."

Remember that "elephants don't gallop"  and that the potential for investment trust elephants to beat the market is limited.

D.