As long as people don't mind me waiting 18 months between trades, and not trading amounts remotely large enough to have any effect on the market, sure. Profess

As long as people don't mind me waiting 18 months between trades, and not trading amounts remotely large enough to have any effect on the market, sure. Professionals do have a much harder job of it. As Simon says, they can't sit on their hands for 18 months like I do. I expect if they parked most of the money in an index fund, their customers would start asking why they're paying managed fund rates for an index fund. Might as well go on the record here, and come back in a year to see how I did. I'm considering UK pizza chains and the like; as the UK gets poorer, and people have less money to spend, the money that used to go on eating out drifts downwards into takeaway pizza and the like. All the signs are that the people of the UK are going to have less money and be faced with higher prices, so I'll look for a pizza chain or similar to invest in.