It is not only the novices who have been burned by stock market vagaries. The TMT stocks (telecoms, media and technology) have been the main drivers of the market's astonishing growth in the past 12 months and even the most cautious of fund managers have had to take a gamble on their performance to prevent their portfolios grossly underperforming market benchmarks.

It brings to mind the inadvertent slip of a colleague recently when he referred to the fashionable sectors as TNT. Given the way the value of some has been blown to smithereens in the past 10 days or so, one wonders if he knew something we didn't.