Buy Faroe Petroleum. Sell copper futures. Go long on the dollar. Avoid housebuilders. These are just a few of the recommendations contained in a recent issue of Investors Chronicle. Add in the marketing might of the fund management industry, and it's clear that the private investor doesn't want for suggestions about what to do with his or her money.
But s/he does want for structured advice. Individual recommendations are the trees. What this feature hopes to give you is the wood. Not whether you should buy Barclays or Aviva, or even whether you should buy banks or insurers, but whether you should buy shares at all, or whether gilts, corporate bonds, commodities, property or cash is a more productive use of your funds.
The distinction between this 'big picture' view and the hundreds of individual recommendations we make is important, because generally speaking, it's the big calls on asset allocation that make the money, not the choice of individual instruments.
We're not promising that we'll get these big calls right - nobody can do that - but we've crunched a lot of numbers and canvassed a lot of views to arrive at the conclusions presented here. And we'll do it again. Every three months, we'll review our conclusions in the light of developments and present an updated view of the investment world.
We've deliberately avoided constructing model portfolios or making individual recommendations based on our conclusions, because personal investment decisions depend on a whole lot besides which asset classes we expect to do well and which we don't. Your age, the distribution of your other assets, your risk appetite and your investment objectives and timescales will all affect what you choose to do with your money.
But the Investors Chronicle will continue to make individual recommendations through the share and fund tips that appear in print, as well as the stock screens and bond of the week items that appear on the website.
