It's what you pick to put in your investment basket that counts - Mary Holm

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Monday 27 December 2004

Q. A recent item in your column discussed the benefits of picking a few stocks versus a basket of shares. Your reader advocated picking, while you advocated the basket. I think you're both wrong or both right, depending on how you look at it.

I tried the pure basket approach (pun intended, as you'll see) by going to the financial adviser industry to invest my redundancy at the

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end of 1999.

They invested in property, equities and cash, with growth and value focus, with many managers - all to reduce risk. In the four years since, they turned my $53,000 into $42,000. So in my view, the pure basket approach is clearly not useful.

I also tried the pure picking approach. I bought some Brierley Investments. Solid, paid dividends and all that jazz. Unfortunately, it was about six months before the 1987 crash and those $5 shares ended up at 33 cents. Clearly, the picking approach didn't work.

At the start of this year, I bought a subscription to a private securities analyst. I then cashed in the "basket" - making a loss - and bought the suggested stocks.

To show it's not all been roses, of the 16 companies I have bought into, four have made losses of between 1 per cent and 14 per cent while the other 12 have made profits of between 1 per cent and 56 per cent. Overall, I have made around a 19 per cent gain of about $8500 in capital and dividend payments. In my view, this has been achieved through stock picking AND diversification.

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