Become your own Analyst

You cannot rely on the professionals
You should always be careful about relying on the judgement of City and Wall Street professionals. With a few exceptions, they are not very good at stock selection, although it does not always diminish their power to move markets. You may check broker recommendations on individual companies at Times Online (www.timesonline.co.uk).

You can obtain summaries of analysts’ research reports in the magazine Investors Chronicle, although bear in mind they are not new and the institutions will have already acted on them.

Learn the basics of fundamental analysis yourself, so you can understand the output of analysts, and pick, or help to pick, your own stocks. It is what this module is all about.

An investor must examine his or her investment thesis and should be able to explain it to teenagers, according to Anthony Bolton, fund manager at Fidelity. Much hard work is needed to reach this ideal.

It seems that women are better at it than men. One broker has found that women do about 40 per cent more research than men on every trade, according to a June 2006 white paper on spread betting commissioned by Finspreads and prepared by two academics from Cass Business School.