Investment

October is always a turbulent month, and I’m feeling uneasy about this one. The FTSE100 index, which looked set to break through 7,000 in September, has lost more than 500 points since then — and would have lost more but for manoeuvres in the mining sector. Pessimism stalks the bond markets, and even a falling oil price is read more as a harbinger of faltering growth than a stimulus for further recovery. Ebola is the new volcanic ash cloud, and attention is focused on the apparently incorrigible weakness of the eurozone — where the biggest problem is what was long seen as the most potent solution, namely the German economy.

There was a time when having almost two hundred of your citizens blown out of the sky was a big deal for a western democracy. But when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine last month, killing 193 Dutch citizens and a couple of dozen other Europeans, the response was conspicuous public mourning, some mild objections, a soupçon more sanctions, but otherwise nothing. Everyone knew which government might have handed powerful surface-to-air missiles to eastern Ukraine’s rebels. But nobody seemed willing or able to do anything much about it. There was also a time when whole swaths of the map being overrun by Islamic groups who make al-Qa’eda

A strange language is spoken on Planet Finance. It often seems designed to baffle the average investor, and save the richest pickings for the professionals. Take, for example, ‘investment trusts’ — they’re investments, certainly, but they are not trusts. And since blind faith is the last thing to invest in any money-making exercise, the two terms make an odd pairing. The most important decision an average investor has to make is to trust their money with a good manager in a promising sector. And this is the main attraction of Investment Trusts. If you fancied a bet on Japan, for example, your first thought may be a straightforward fund, like

I have a confession to make. I earn my living advising my readers whether particular companies’ shares are going to go up or down. I have no idea whether an individual share will go up or down. Fortunately, nor does anyone else. That goes for the analysts, investment bankers, fund managers, accountants and other professionals who work in the City and earn a great deal more than I do. As the scriptwriter William Goldman said, no one knows anything. My abject failure to predict the future has two consequences. One: I am sitting here typing this, rather than being on a beach somewhere, counting my yachts. Two: the best I

Hands up: who knows what a FOBT is? It stands for fixed odds betting terminal. No? Well, you should, because they are a serious menace to society. That’s what Ed Miliband says, anyway. FOBTs, you see, are those souped-up slot machines one can find in bookmakers’ shops all over the country, especially in deprived areas, usually next to Poundland. The most popular ones offer casino-type games, such as roulette, and have become notorious because of the speed with which they enable punters to lose large sums of money: up to £100 every 20 seconds, apparently. The Daily Mail likes to call FOBTs the ‘crack cocaine of gambling’, which makes them

A successful gambler once told me: ‘Never bet on football, never bet on multipliers, and never ever bet on football multipliers.’ Multipliers, in case you don’t know, are those enticing combination wagers on bookmakers’ shopfronts: ‘Liverpool win 2-0 + Sturridge to score = 33/1.’ Mugs like me fall for them every time. My subconscious tends to add together the two probabilities — that of Sturridge scoring and that of Liverpool winning 2-0 — when really I should be multiplying them. Duh. The bookies don’t always triumph when it comes to football, however. This year’s Champions League has so far seen few upsets: as a result, the major sports bookmakers have