Growing up 1950s in a large very limited resource family on a small poor-in-entertainment Island (no TV) meant that our mother was hard put to keep her group (of seven kids) occupied. Doing chores only went just so far, and then the handcrafts would get taken out. Both boys and girls learned to sew, knit, crochet, fish, garden, sail, row, and so on and then, she would send us off to the library in town. An event, even today, looked on with great relish by some, although not all of us; the boys found reading boring; we girls read voraciously through every single book that we could get our hands on. While there were no fancy drawings (or touchy-feely texture books) such as those from Maurice Sendak, ?The Polar Express? or my own children?s favourite ?Lowly Worm? (Richard Scarry) as well as the exquisite drawings of Trina Schart Hyman (now deceased), is there truly anything better than curled-up-comfy in a corner with a great book and a box of chocolates.

In those days, the library on Queen Street was part of what used to be the Trim?s store, upstairs and more recently occupied by an investment firm. It was small, a teeny, tiny place, but a place of magic and imagination even though the librarians were very strict. You were only allowed to take out two books at a time, dooming intense kids like me to a day of remote wonder (both books could be devoured in a day) followed by days of total boredom before being allowed to return our books and get two more. Hating to have nothing to read thus nothing to look forward to, at age nine, I started hoarding books worthy of reading again. And having read every single volume of interest in the children?s library, I moved on to everything else with print on it. You name it, we read it: newspapers, cereal boxes, advertisements, women?s magazines (that my mother loved), British POW war recollections, German U-boat war books, Holocaust survivor memoirs, ?Before the Mast?, just about every Charles Dickens, etc. Then we discovered my parent?s mystery / murder / crime books. Rather than being grossed out, I was hooked! My mother, appalled that someone so young thrived on stories so gruesome, hid them unsuccessfully. And I kept hoarding good reads, ?for a rainy day?. This tremendous craving for the written word has reaped terrible habits; still reading everything, still saving for later (sometimes many years later) anything that looks like a potentially interesting subject. That way, you see, I always, always, have a reading contingency plan.

Our bookshelves slope under the weight of hundreds of books, articles, binders and financial journals, waiting to be rediscovered. From time to time it is interesting, although not always so amusing to revisit old financial publications. Were those ponderous proclamations of investment gurus given years ago, accurate? Did their stock picks turn out to be lemons or lemonade? I pulled a stock picking articles out from 1999-2000. Let?s see if they were on the mark more than six years later.

?Ten Stocks to Last a Decade? said Fortune Magazine in their 2000 Guide to Investing, and with much hyperbole, Fortune talks about next ten year trends. They inform us that they have done their due diligence by talking to some of the best stock pickers in the country: Blaine Rollins, of Janus, Kurt von Emster, Franklin Biotech Discovery Fund, Frank Gannon, Sunamerica, Marshall Acuff at Salomon Smith Barney.

And what a list of ten! Enron, bankrupt, Nortel, market value just above penny stocks, and all the others five years later, well, see the chart for yourself. Not one market value near those pre-bubble highs. Oh, well, perhaps Fortune was being a tad aggressive at that point in time.

But, what is really happening here? Why haven?t these names recovered? The whole market can?t be like this; otherwise no one would remain invested. Plus anyone thinking of investing is backing off real fast at this point, but wait there is one more criteria.

How well did these companies perform over ten years, or since the initial public offering of the shares? As you can see, a completely different story with eight upsiders and two losses. Yes, some of them have had only modest gains, but gains never the less.

The moral of the story: buy and hold still works; quality things are always worth the wait; but from time to time, it?s a good idea to clean out, consolidate and get rid of the no-longer useful items.

If selecting and monitoring individual securities is not your cup of tea, one of the more conservative ways to start is by using structured notes.

These equity-linked investments offer a capital protection component, along with the opportunity to participate in capital market appreciation over time.

Martha Harris Myron CPA/PFS CFP? is a VP and Senior Private Banker, Private Client Services, Bank of Bermuda Member HSBC Group. She specialises in providing comprehensive financial solutions for individuals and their families. E-mail: marthamyronnorthrock.bm

The article expresses the opinion of the author alone. Under no circumstances is the content of this article to be taken as specific individual investment advice, nor as a recommendation to buy/ sell any investment product. The Editor of The Royal Gazette has final right of approval over headlines, content, and length/brevity of article.