18 OCTOBER 2003, Page 42

Writing in The Spectator's City and Finance issue:

F_ irst confidence, then enthusiasm, then panic, then funk — that, so Sir Patrick Sergeant would say, is the market's cycle.

Earlier this year, when share prices had fallen by half from the peak they reached at the end of the last millennium, we touched panic. Now the optimists think we have reached funk and are on the way up again. The pessimists are not so sure. They remember, from earlier cycles, the traps that await those who can't wait to get back to normal — and mean by that a market where money grows on trees.

In The Spectator's City and Finance special issue this year, individually-minded investors give their own perspective. Nigel Thomas, manager of Framlington's Select Opportunites Fund, goes for shares — but selectively! Robin Angus, a director of Personal Assets Trust, offers hope and guidance (in verse) to the broke, bewildered, battered middle classes.

William H. Janeway, Spectator columnist of an earlier era and now vice-chairman of Warburg Pincus, the New York investment bank, shows how information technology, like the railways and canals before it, will make other people's fortunes. Jim Budd, editor of Circle Update. the newsletter of the Circle of Wine Writers, warns wouldbe investors not to judge the bottle by the label — or the spiel.

George Trefgarne, the Daily Telegraph's Comment Editor, meets Baron David de Rothschild, the new first among equals in the world's most famous banking dynasty and now speaking for the first time after taking the helm at New Court, the Rothschilds' ancestral City base.

Becky Barrow, also on the Daily Telegraph's staff, spends a lively day with Digby Jones, the CBI's outspoken director-general.

Professor David Kynaston, the historian of the City, revisits it in the year 1828, when The Spectator was founded. He finds them both on the verge of great things — and in the City an earlier Rothschild is showing the way.

Christopher Fildes brings up the rear. He has been exploring City and Suburban territory on The Spectator's behalf for 37 years.