Switch over to the stock market- May 2003

Martin Fagan - Personal Finance (UK)

A casual glance at any issue of the Radio Times will reveal a host of property-related programmes, such as Property Ladder, DIY SOS, Home Front, Changing Rooms, House Doctor, Location, Location, Location – and that’s just prime time on the five terrestrial channels. In the last few years, with the property market cheerily buoyant, programmes about improving your home – whether to sell it, add to its value or enhance the quality of your life – have proliferated. Which is why you should take that as a sign to start investing in the stock market.

Why? Well, it’s obvious. To quote Warren Buffett, once you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to chase it. The plethora of property-related programmes is proof – at least to a contrarian like me – that there is little value left in the property market. The absolute dearth of investment-related programmes on TV tells me that it’s time to buy the stock market again.

Hard as it may be to remember, fewer than three years ago there were a number of programmes on TV about investing. Among them was Bulls & Bears, which went out to insomniac viewers of ITV, and Show Me The Money, which went out daily at midday on C4. A rotating bunch of teams were given a mythical £10,000 each, and they had to pick five shares, one of which they had to sell at the end of the programme and buy another one.

The reason why I remember Show Me The Money so clearly is because its co-host and chief stock market pundit was my colleague at a financial website, Tom Winnifrith, a Personal Finance columnist even in those days. In the first series of SMTM, broadcast in the autumn of 1999, Tom would go off wearing a suit and a shirt-and-tie combo he’d found while rummaging in a skip, talking to his pet broker on one of his several mobile phones.

Between the first series of SMTM and the second – summer 2000 – the investment world had changed, but nobody quite knew it. The teams on SMTM were unswerving in their selection of technology stocks, the prices of which were softening, just prior to their melting and then vaporising. By diving deeply into a tight investment niche – technology – the teams had given themselves absolutely no room for manoeuvring. Each day, the team’s portfolios were haemorrhaging value and, at the end of that series, the winning team was the one whose losses were less catastrophic than its rivals. Not surprisingly, C4 declined to commission a third series.

So what’s this got to do with the glut of property programmes currently choking the TV schedules? Well, I’ve just sold a house I bought in 1995, when the housing market was not so much in the doldrums as dead in the water. At that time, the only peak-time TV property programme was Home Front and, as the forecast for the housing market was bleak, the thrust of the programme was about tarting up what you already owned. And as we’d just moved into a wreck, the advice was gratefully received.

From being an idea on the back of an envelope to being broadcast on TV, a series takes about a year. If, three years from now (one year for the market to recover, one year for people to notice and one year in which to make the TV series), investment-related programmes explode like a rash on the pages of the Radio Times, the stock market bandwagon will be rolling already and you’ll have missed it. Time to jump on it now, methinks.


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