John Chatfeild-Roberts: don't expect to turn a pound into £1,000 However, it seems to us that to lend to the British or American governments for 10 years at 2pc or less isn't a sensible thing to do. We prefer equities, which we don't view as necessarily risky. People confuse risk with volatility. Volatility is just prices going up and down. We all remember 1987 as the year of the crash. But if you'd gone to sleep on January 1 and woken up on December 31 and you'd had investments in the UK market, all you'd notice is that they would have gone up by 2pc to 3pc. People concentrate too much on price movements and don't look carefully enough at the outcomes, and also forget about the benefits of reinvesting income. There was a great advert from F & C about 15 years ago, "get rich slowly." And that's what people should be trying to do. You really shouldn't put it all on black and expect to turn a pound into £1,000. What advice would you give UK investors? What matters is whether the thing you own will be there in 10 or 15 years, and what purchasing power will be. Buy investments that don't have a time limit. Time will often bail out a badly timed decision, but anything that can expire - an option, derivative or bond - can expire worthless before whatever you were hoping to happen actually does. What has changed since you began investing? Debt levels are much higher but somehow the debates are similar. I sat next to Francis Brooke from Troy at a lunch recently and he reminded me that in 1994 I had given him an ear-bashing about how dreadful the prospect of European monetary union was. I studied it at university and thought it was a terrible idea. At the time he didn't believe me, but it has rather come to pass! I started managing money in 1990 at Henderson and although the faces change and the regulations change, the basics are the same as always. Investment is about common sense - trying to buy things that are likely to go up in price in the future and trying to avoid things that are going to go down. Do you think history repeats itself? There are certainly times when you think: "I've seen this sort of behaviour before." I've learnt to buy when others are fearful. Last August, when markets dropped sharply and the gold price shot up, it felt very panicky. So at the margin in our portfolios I made sure we started doing the opposite. Most people were selling shares, we were trying to buy. We also lightened up on our gold exposure, as the price seemed to be going up ridiculously fast. What has your best investment ever been? Buying Jupiter. Since it floated at 165pc a share in June 2010 Jupiter's share price peaked at 337.3p in February last year; it is now 243.5p. I put money into Jupiter and came up trumps. The best portfolio investment was buying Findlay Park American. I went in at $10 in 1998 and the current price is around $40. What has your worst investment ever been? I bought a house in August 1988 then sold it in 1991. That was a truly catastrophic investment. I lost around 90pc of the money I put in. It taught me a huge lesson about gearing. Who do you admire in the industry? I have always thought that people are the crucial differentiator in the fund management business. We have made a lot of money out of James Findlay, Neil Woodford, Angus Tulloch - we prefer people who have been around for a bit. Anthony Bolton has been a good investment in the past. Nils Taube was a fascinating character, a tremendous man. He died in March 2008, aged 79, sitting at his Bloomberg machine. He was originally from eastern Europe, he got a job in the filing department of Kitcat & Aitken and was picked up as being a bright spark. He went on to return investors in his two funds 15pc a year for nearly 40 years. As a fund of funds manager, my job has predominately been interviewing different people, and you learn from every one. Do you intend to do the same, and never retire? What I have observed about good fund managers is once they've got the bug they find it very difficult to give up. And the ones who do give up often come crawling back. We are very privileged. As Nils Taube said: "It's like being paid to do the crossword."