A win-win proposition, but not for the punters

Edie Lush endures a ‘Win Investing’ seminar which fails in  its promise to reveal the secrets of stock-market success

‘What percentage of ten trillion pounds do you need to be happy?’ asks the young Australian called Jonathan who is instructing the ‘free’ Win Investing seminar I’m attending. You may have heard Win Investing’s irritating ads on Classic FM, pressing you to attend one of about 18 free sessions a week available in Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and London. You’re promised that by spending two and a half hours with a tutor like Jonathan, you’ll learn the secrets of trading the £1 trillion UK and £9 trillion US stock markets. Jonathan reminisces back to when he was in the very place we’re sitting four years ago — he was on his way to an interview with Morgan Stanley when he stumbled across this tutorial and never looked back. He doesn’t actually say how rich the stock market has made him, but we infer from the slick black suit and offhand remarks about the three companies he now runs that we’re in the hands of a Win Investing success story.

It becomes clear almost immediately, however, that the free seminar is not going to reveal any hot tips. Rather, it is 190 minutes of heavy sell to get me and 25 other participants to part with £3,100 (or sign up today at the wildly discounted price of £1,970) for the privilege of going on a three-day course where we’ll really learn the elusive secrets of the stock market. If you want to ‘work less, retire sooner and improve your lifestyle’, we’re told, you must ‘invest in yourselves’ — starting by handing over several grand to Win Investing.

Jonathan keeps his promise of imparting some kind of market knowledge with a rattling tour from ‘what is a share?’ to the slightly more complex concept of writing covered calls options.