My father-in-law had a newsagent shop in the East End of London in the 1970s. He would sit there on a Sunday morning, pipe in the corner of his mouth, reading share tips in the business pages before neatly folding the paper and putting it back on the pile to be sold.
He would buy UK shares if he found the tips convincing. I’m not sure he sold many copies of the FT in that part of London, but whatever he was reading worked. He continued investing beyond retirement. When he passed away in 2016 we found a couple of dozen paper share certificates in his drawers, including a very profitable stake in Arm Holdings.
When I retired from full-time fund management last year I had more time to review my own savings and think about how I want to invest. Maybe I learned some things from my father-in-law. He had a simple approach: he was a businessman who bought equities because he liked owning a stake in other, much bigger businesses and enjoying the profits as they grew.