Confessions of an Impulsive Investor: I put my inheritance into a magpie Isa of specialist investment trusts and snazzy ETFs, and it's up 20% - so far...
Adrian Lowery for Thisismoney.co.uk
My father used to ‘play the stock market’.
He folded the profits from his small business in the 1970s into company shares, some of which came as recommendations from his stockbroker, over the bakelite telephone with a twisted brown cord.
He added to this substantially with the big privatisations of the 1980s, and left a decent sum to my mum when he died in 1997. She fortunately sold the portfolio before the stock market went down the pan at the turn of the millennium.