All at sea: how I got started with trend investing

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So let’s return to the story of my £150,000 – with me now determined not to let my money do nothing for another fifteen years.

To start with, I decided to go down to my investment company’s office and see what help and information they were prepared to offer me. Given the woeful service they had provided up to this point, they could hardly refuse. I knew exactly what I wanted: the most up-to-date data available on all the unit trust funds on their investment platform. I asked for it and to their credit they agreed, and an employee was instructed to supply me with the data on a regular basis.

This company provided access to about seventy funds. Compared with the number of funds on investment platforms today, with thousands upon thousands available at the click of a mouse, this was a pitifully small selection. But back then (it was the year 2000) this was all that was on offer, and I didn’t know any better anyway. For my purposes it was a good start.

The data I was supplied consisted of the one-year, three-year and five-year performance figures for each fund, updated every month. And it was accompanied by the bid and offer (buy and sell) prices for these same funds.

By keeping a long-hand record of these fund numbers, I was able to establish and graph the movements of these funds on a monthly basis. This was critical. It meant I was free from the nonsense of decision-making based on one-year, three-year and five-year performance that the financial establishment dictated.

I was learning as I went. And after a while one particular thing became very obvious.

I began to notice that some funds would move together in the same direction, be it up or down, as if in tandem. This is when it started to dawn on me that there must be some outside control at work – something that caused those different individual funds, run by different individual managers, to move in alignment.

What could that be? I made some enquiries and eventually found out the answer.

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