uk stock market almanac

OK, I accept the Bible wins on the catchier title, and they’ve probably sold a few more copies too, but for anyone seriously investing in the UK stock market, this is the more important of the two books you should own (unless your investment strategy is hold and pray of course!)

It’s 245 pages crammed full of useful (and useless) information that may help you create some novel investment strategies. The first half of the book is laid out in a diary format, with detailed analysis of previous years performance, so you can see at a glance what type of stocks normally do well at what time of the year, and any established trends.

For example, without the stock market almanac, how would I know that traditionally, July 11th is a fairly good day for trading, with the market as a whole rising on between 50-70% of previous July 11th’s, but look out tomorrow, as the market has fallen on over 70% of July 12th’s, and next week is also traditionally one of the worst weeks of the year. NOTE: As an example of why you shouldn’t follow this as “law”, today looks like being one of the 30-50% of days when the market falls, with the FTSE currently down 31 points

Good times ahead in August (well, good compared to what is normally a dismal May to October) – August is the strongest of these months normally, with a 67% probability of a positive return (compared to 43% in May). This really is a statistician’s dream – You can even see why you should sell your portfolio if England win the Ashes, and why if you’d pulled all your cash out for just 10 days out of the last 23 years, you could have doubled your money.

It’s also full of useless information that you can use in pub quizzes etc (Did you know for instance that Big Ben sounded its chimes for the first time on this day in 1859? Or that tomorrow is the 47th anniversary of the very first Etch-a-Sketch? No, why would you – you haven’t got the Almanac!)

The second half of the Almanac gets much more serious, leaving behind the fun facts and statistical quirks. instead giving you a full directory of every company registered on the London Stock Exchange, complete with their EPIC code, market cap, average volume, AGM dates, year end and website address – Perfect for research!

You’ll also find as you use the diary part of the book, that the likely companies to be reporting that week will be listed, so if you trade around results, this could be a useful tool too. You can obviously still pick up the 2007 version, which I would advise doing to familiarise yourself with the format. The 2008 UK Stock Market Almanac is due to be released on 1st November 2007 – Just in time for a nice Christmas present (hint! hint!)

OK, time to fire up the Delorean and go make my Dad a very rich man!

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