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Don’t do the following

• Trade into investment fads. History is littered with investment fads. Believe it or not, in seventeenth-century Amsterdam the great thing to invest in was tulip bulbs. Some bulbs were so ‘valuable’ that people would mortgage their houses to buy one bulb. You see, they had heard of friends getting rich by buying a bulb and selling it a few months later. Of course, it ended in tears with bulb prices falling to a fraction of the previous levels. Another highlight (lowlight!) was the railway boom of the nineteenth century. More recently, we have had the dotcom boom, biotechnology and green energy. In my view, the latest batch of companies from Silicon Valley have a faint whiff of the fad about them – speculators are pricing ...