MARCUS PADLEY THIS MONTH

A tried-and-tested approach to investing is to buy yourself 20 Australian stocks, never selling, sagely quoting Warren Buffett at dinner parties and wondering why you are going nowhere. But there are alternatives.

Here we go with four of them – 40 years of stockbroking wisdom and stupidity distilled.

1 The Boat Fund

In the 1990s, a couple of city traders, one a fund manager and the other a stockbroker, bought a $400,000 boat that then sat, ostentatiously, on a mooring off the yacht club in Sorrento, on the Mornington Peninsula, in Melbourne. It was a symbol of how the stockmarket can pay off.

The story goes that some years earlier they had agreed to each put $50,000 into a joint account they called the Boat Fund