Free Pay Off by Stephen Leather Page A

job. It wasn't pillow talk, that would come later, this was just getting it all off my chest. Like a chat with an analyst, that's the way I looked at it. I was pissed, and when I'm pissed I talk too much.
    If you've got a couple of thousand pounds to invest there are a number of things you can do. In fact a host of friendly advisors will beat a path to your door with a view to tucking away your nest egg in one of their many and varied schemes.
    You can shove it into a Building society or deposit account and forget about it, collecting the interest every few months. It's boring, to be honest, and you'll never make a fortune unless you start with half a fortune and wait ten years or so, but your capital is as safe as houses.
    You can put the lot into Premium Bonds, and wait for Ernie to pick one of his electronic ping pong balls out of his electronic hat with your number on it. You've more chance 66 of winning than you have of being struck by lightning but statistically you're better off putting your hard-earned loot in the care of Mr Bradford and Mr Bingley. If your luck's in you could cream off a fortune, but that could also be said of the football pools. I guess that's why so many people are glued to their TV sets on Saturday afternoons - dreaming of the big one, but if it doesn't come off, well, there's always next week, isn't there? It's a mug's game. You might as well toddle into a casino and plonk the lot on zero. Sometimes that comes up, too.
    At the opposite end of the financial spectrum are the out and out gambles, the City equivalent of betting on a 250-1 outsider running in the Grand National. There are get-richquick schemes like buying those large containers used to ship antiques over to America, disgraced diplomats to Nigeria and stolen cars to the Middle East. You rent them out to export companies and pocket a healthy profit, in theory, but more likely they'll just lie rusting in some disused dockyard and your money will evaporate faster than goodwill at a creditors' meeting. Not to be recommended.
    Anyway, back to Mr Average looking for a home for his two grand. He's probably heard about the stock market, the mystical exchange where fortunes are won and lost-, and if he is a little curious he's maybe read about penny shares, buying them at 9p each and selling a few months later when they're worth �6.15. Mr Average, being average, is more than a little greedy and reckons that the stock market is the place for his hard-earned cash.
    He might be right, but he'll be playing in one of the biggest casinos in the world, with rumours and counterrumours sending share prices soaring and crashing, a bad set of results blighting a firm's shares for months, a takeover bid sending them through the roof.
    Putting all your eggs in one basket is a doubtful way of investing, but Mr Average's �2,000 would have to go on one share to make any sense at all, dealing costs and stamp duty 67 see to that, and picking that one share makes it a gamble. Back to the racecourse.
    There is an alternative: a unit trust or an investment trust. Different animals but with a similar aim, the spreading of risk. Get together a group of investors, pool their capital and put their money into several shares, gilts, maybe even property. Then spread the rewards. There'll obviously be a few misses, but the many hits will more than cover them.
    The main difference between unit and investment trusts is that investment trusts come in the form of shares listed on the stock exchange. To buy unit trusts you go to the firm which manages them. Both sorts of trusts specialize, in sectors like electronics or natural resources, or in parts of the world like the Far East or America.
    Edinburgh has always been a major centre of investment trusts, going back to the days when canny Scots realized there was many a mickle to be made out of America, but they were also canny enough to realize that there was safety in numbers. Shareholders made small fortunes out of