Hot stocks and naughty boys

What do the following have in common: metatarsally challenged footballing wonderkid Wayne Rooney, two-time-Ashes-winning spin bowler Phil Edmonds, one-time Greek oil explorer Frank Timis, and ‘Brian Cohen’, the eponymous hero of The Life of Brian? Is it that they are not messiahs, but in fact rather naughty boys; or that they are all regarded favourably by Gordon Brown; or that you can invest in them all via the London Stock Exchange?

This is, of course, a trick question. The answer is, implausibly enough, all of the above, because they all represent controversial but strangely tax-efficient investment opportunities on London’s junior stock market. Welcome to the colourful world of Aim.

Aim, or the Alternative Investment Market, was set up in 1995 as an exchange on which shares in small companies could be issued and traded. It offered a lower-cost and less heavily regulated alternative to the ‘official list’ of the London Stock Exchange, hence the semantic distinction between fully ‘listed’ and Aim ‘traded’ companies.