I used to have a couple of company investments he said but I thought I didn’t

“I used to have a couple of company investments,” he said, “but I thought I didn’t have the skill to manage them and that is why I bought an active fund.”Mr Capel was attracted to the Recovery Fund because it invests in shares which the market undervalues because they are not trendy. Inevitably, the latest market slump has taken its toll of the Recovery Fund, rolling it back to where it was about three years ago “That’s why I don’t invest a lump sum,” Mr Capel said “This way I’m buying at the lower levels. When the market starts climbing again, I hope it will recover.”The passive investor: ‘I am not an expert, so I want something that I can rely on’Janet Williams is a tracker fan ­ but mainly because she is really a Richard Branson fan. “I don’t know what it is about him,” she says, “but everything he does seems to work so well.”Mrs Williams has a Virgin credit card, a Virgin life insurance policy, a Virgin savings account, and this summer she and her family are off to Florida on a Virgin holiday. So, when it came to investment, it was almost inevitable that she would invest in the Virgin UK Index Tracking Trust, which buys shares in every one of the 750 companies in the FTSE All-Share index.”About four years ago I was in a job that didn’t carry a pension,” Mrs Williams recalls, “so I thought I would stick some money in what was then a Personal Equity Plan. I’m in a job with a pension now, but I have just kept with the Virgin tracker as an ISA and I must have invested between £10,000 and £15,000 overall.”Both Mrs Williams and her husband, David, work for charities ­ he with the Royal British Legion, she with Help the Aged.

They live in Croydon, Surrey, with their sons Martin, 15, and Simon, 18.”I’m not an expert,” Mrs Williams explains, “and so I want to invest somewhere I can rely on. Virgin products do what they say they are going to, and they make things simple. I feel my finances are in good hands with them, and I can pick up the phone and get advice in plain, simple English.”. Greed is at last challenging fear in investors’ emotions: at a six-year low, the market is throwing out strong vibes of potential bargains.

Social chatter I hear is now “If only we had the money!” and “If only I knew what to pick!”. The danger is that in the current volatile market, as the old City adage goes, reaching for the right share is a bit like trying to grab a falling knife – difficult and potentially painful. Moneynet Greed is at last challenging fear in investors’ emotions. At a six-year low, the market is throwing out strong vibes of potential bargains. Word is that some institutions are picking up what they see as value stocks, if only a few bargains, and certainly they are not selling (much) Crucially, they are not exactly awash with cash.

I fancy a visible long-term story, mainly in FTSE 100 stocks, the first to benefit from institutional sentiment changes. Good liquidity there allows a quick exit if I want to funk out.I have been won over by the notion of jumping in now, even if the bottom may be as much as 10 per cent away. Market makers, frantically gyrating prices to turn a penny and still keep balanced books, tell me that on the turn the market could be up 15 per cent before a blink.While the chartists continue to terrify, strategists are more optimistic. A whole host of stockbrokers’ strategists, from Charles Stanley, Paribas and SocGen to ABN Amro, are pointing to the gap between the yield on equity dividends and interest on fixed income stocks. Between index-linked stocks and average dividend yields that gap is at around a 10-year high. At about 3.5 per cent, the average dividend yield matches what you would get in a building society, and loads of Footsie stocks now yield getting on for 5 per cent.But there are still plenty more jitters-inducing obstacles to cross.