Growing up near Brighton, there were times when I felt my parents’ lives revolved around the Australian stock market.

My father, Michael, was a passionate fan of horse racing, frequenting the local Ladbrokes well into his 90s.

One of his card-playing pals, who joined our weekly kalooki games, had a penchant for dabbling in the stock market.

This friend advised my father that any extra cash could be wisely invested in Oil Search, a penny stock listed in Sydney at the time (now no longer listed).

Oil Search shares were a thrill-seeker’s dream. Whenever news hinted at a potential find, the shares skyrocketed, prompting my parents to cash in and jet off on a European getaway.

However, when the company struck water instead of oil, the share prices took a nosedive.

It was an early lesson in the art of buying low and selling high. The pattern went on for several years until Oil Search really did find a gusher.

Gilts, as we have learned since the Liz Truss mini-Budget, can no longer be regarded as providing the same safety net as was once the case

The whole experience whetted my appetite for stock market investment. In those days, back in the 1960s and 1970s, buying and selling shares could be done over the counter at your local bank.

It is only in recent times that the high street banks, with the notable exception of Barclays, decided executing share deals was yet another service to customers that wasn’t profitable enough.

In fact, a decade or so ago, my family received a letter from Lloyds Bank returning a pile of moribund share certificates of companies that vanished from the London market decades ago.

With an economics degree and a master’s degree in business in the 1970s, I was recruited to the City Desk of a national newspaper.

My apprenticeship was in the results and dealings of public companies before graduating to coverage of banks, the financial markets and economics.

The Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes once observed ‘that in the long run we are all dead’. The Barclays Equity Gilt Study comes up with a different answer

It was then I first came across the annual surveys into the performance of asset classes, reaching way back into history, produced by now-defunct investment bank Credit Suisse and Barclays.

The Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes once observed ‘that in the long run we are all dead’. 

The Barclays Equity Gilt Study comes up with a different answer. Shares are more volatile than cash and gilts – UK Government stock – over the short term. 

But it reveals with data collected from 1899 to 2023 that the odds on shares outperforming cash have been 70pc over two years, rising to 91pc over ten years.

Yet as we get older, pension fund managers and financial advisers are compelled, or feel they have no other choice, but to move life-long savings from shares and equity funds into gilts or fixed interest. It is a trend I have stoutly resisted in my own portfolio.

Gilts, as we have learned since the Liz Truss mini-Budget, can no longer be regarded as providing the same safety net as was once the case. 

In the desire to make bonds sweat and improve returns, pension fund managers used gilts to gamble on the derivatives market with the creation of a derivative known as liability-driven investments (LDIs).

When the gilts market blew up in the autumn of 2022 after the Truss episode, so did the LDIs. The Bank of England, wearing its financial stability hat, had to step in with a multi-billion rescue to prevent a cascade of financial failures.

Far from being the safest of investments, gilts proved to be as volatile as much-disparaged share markets, often criticised by those on the Left as no more than casinos. 

As a City Editor for three-and-a-half decades, I have had to be extremely cautious in my share dealings. I have made no purchases of stocks written about for several weeks, before or after.

As a matter of policy, I never sell unless forced to do so. In recent years, my tendency has been to buy equity funds, rather than individual shares, on the grounds they are less subject to the influence of anything that might be written than individual stocks.

The results of my share buying have been mixed. In 2007, shortly before the banking sector exploded in the Great Financial Crisis, as a holder of NatWest/Royal Bank of Scotland shares, I poured money into Fred Goodwin’s last-ditch effort to save his bank with a bumper £12billion rights issue to existing shareholders. Those hard-earned savings might have just as well been poured down the drain.

Similarly, when a small family legacy came along, on the guidance of investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown’s ‘wealth list’, money was ploughed into Neil Woodford’s flagship Equity Income Fund, which collapsed in 2019. The cost of that episode to my portfolio is still being counted.

On a more positive note, holding long through thick and thin can pay rich dividends.

I have held Rolls-Royce shares for many years. It almost went belly up in the pandemic but the recovery since then has been spectacular and the shares have advanced more than ten times in value taking the group to almost the top of the FTSE 100.

Similarly, my holdings in two funds, Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust and Polar Capital, both of which have been at the forefront of the Silicon Valley and biotech revolutions, have been investments which keep on giving.

I have recently warned readers several times that overhype for AI may be distorting tech valuations and a crash could be on the way.

But in keeping with past practice, the plan, unless the cash is needed for family emergencies, is to hang on through the volatility.

Despite one or two setbacks, holding long has worked well and the gains far more substantial than in cash Isa or fixed interest funds. 

Rachel Reeves and HMRC, with assaults on capital gains and inheritance, currently are the only barrier between me and my belief in stocks and shares.

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