Learning is fun! Five year olds Tom Whitehouse and Harriet Brook revel in new facilities at Oatlands County Infant School, Harrogate, as Amy Brown, of Homeowners Friendly Society (top right) and head teacher Janet Davis look on

From now on we will let you into the secrets of the RICH.

RICH stands for the Ridings investment Club Holdings, a group of a dozen managers or retired managers from Nestl Rowntree, York, who have been playing the shares market regularly - and winning.

Every month we will eavesdrop on their investment tactics - the formulae and hunches, know-how and savvy which have brought 130 per cent increases in the outlay of original members since they started the club six years ago, and now each contributing £30 a month.

Here, regularly for everyone to see, are their RICH pickings.

Not that we or they are recommending that you ape their selections with your money. When it comes to your own investments you, the reader, must back your own luck or judgement in the light of that much-intoned truism: that the market can go down as well as up.

RICH, with its careful computer monitoring of daily prices and reading of the runes in the financial press, may be hugely successful but its members will be the first to agree that they are not infallible.

What they are hoping you will get out of it, though - even vicariously -is the same buzz of elation and disappointment, wariness and devil-may-care, horse trading and hilarity which drives them at their monthly get-togethers.

At the helm of RICH is its chairman, the genial wheelchair-bound Jim Porteous of Hessay whose understanding of commerce, industry and market movements serves the club well.

Years ago he worked for Leonard and Wilson, stockbrokers, then of Lendal in York. He went on to become trade communications manager at Nestle Rowntree, York and for 12 years until his retirement last December was its sales promotions manager. Now he has set up Notions, a marketing, public relations and property management company.

Jim says: "Our ages range between 30 and 65. We meet monthly and need a quorum but with constant communication between us by e-mail we can pretty rapidly agree on emergency decisions. We are also given valuable help from Proshare, the club-forming organisation.

"Our portfolio generally consists of full London market investments but where at first we were scared of the Alternative Investment Market, AIMS became so popular that eventually we decided to have a go. I'm glad we did because these are the source of some of our more spectacular gains."

Units in the Club investments are appropriately called RICHs. Such has been their success that where the original RICH was worth £1 at a last look it is now valued at £2.90. Members can sell their RICHs and take profits but generally these are ploughed back into the portfolio.

Treasurer is Tony Kempster, sales business systems manager at Nestl whose computer skills generate detailed graphs and system alerts when the market starts falling. He does the authorised buying and selling.

One of his latest graphs charts the progress of RICH in the six years between April 1994 and April 2000 and in the club's first October its line plummets in something of a "red alert".

Chairman Jim says: "It was our one very bad experience. We invested in Shoprite in a big way and it went bust. We learned a lot from that about the balance between risk and security."

The graph clearly proves that the lesson was heeded because from then on the RICH portfolio seemed to parallel exactly the gentle increase in the market over the ensuing six years - that is until last October when the RICH line swung off the parallel and traversed the market line to soar off the page.

At each meeting members study charts for every holding showing either short term or long term progress. In most cases there are "safety lines" above and below the progress line. These are the stop loss or gain limits which when reached for good or ill, will trigger sale of stock, "although we reserve the right whether to agree to continue to play our luck or stick with our hunch," says Jim.

see also 'Moving out before the technology bubble bursts'

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.