Please send your queries to Dominic Coyle, Q&A, The Irish Times, 11-15 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2, or e-mail to dcoyle@irish-times.ie. This column is a reader service and is not intended to replace professional advice. Due to the volume of mail, there may be a delay in answering queries. All suitable queries will be answered through the columns of the newspaper. No personal correspondence will be entered into.

Investing

I am 29 years old and have about £15,000 (#19,050) to invest. During the last month I have spoken to a dozen different salesmen and received a dozen very different views. I can see returns from different investments in the national papers but where on earth can I find a simple guide that tells me who's doing best among the different funds and information about whether these investments would suit me.

Mr L.O'S., e-mail

You are not alone. Investing for the novice is a most confusing affair. As you are finding out, it seems that everyone has different and often conflicting advice on what you should do. The fact that this is so should not necessarily make you sceptical of all advice. Investing is, to a certain degree, a gamble. You are gambling on items such as the performance of the economy, interest rates, property prices and the return achieved by investment fund managers through their expertise.

You are trying to choose between different options, each of which offers different potential but no guarantee. In many cases, the advice you get will reflect the success the advisers have achieved using such instruments with previous clients.

However, there are some ways in which you can narrow the options open to you. The first of these is to ascertain whether you are investing for the short, medium or long term. At your age, you have the luxury of looking at long-term investments that generally allow time for short-term blips to iron out in the performance of your investment. However, it may be that you are looking to get access to money in the shorter term if you needed to buy a house or were getting married/having children or whatever. Only you can decide.

The second crucial element is your attitude to risk. Again only you can determine this. Some people are happy with more risky investments where the potential return is higher but where there is also a greater risk of losing your invested capital. Others are not prepared to countenance that risk and will look for investment offering lower returns but less chance of losing your money.

It is important to remember that there is no guarantee. Even those funds that offer to return your capital to you at the end of the term, despite the fact that the value of the fund is lower than it was when you first invested, see you losing money as it does not cover the rate of inflation over that time. Right now, with inflation running at more than 6 per cent, that can eat into the real value of your investment.

Another element to consider is whether you are looking for an investment that will yield an income as you go along or one where the growth is in the capital.

The other key thing when seeking advice is to ensure that the advice you are getting is as independent as possible. This can never be guaranteed, but it is certainly impossible when you are getting advice from tied agents - financial advisers who are tied to particular financial institutions. You should go for independent advisers, preferably ones who are fee-based. That means you pay a fee up front for the advisory service you receive. This is generally on an hourly basis.

It is always tempting to opt for advisers offering a free service, but there is a risk that such advisers will be tempted to point investors in the direction of products from which they will get greater income in commission. Such is human nature; advisers have a living to earn too.

As always, there are tax implications in investing and, depending on your own tax situation, certain options may prove more advantageous than others.

Turning to information on the various funds, The Irish Times publishes a list of unit fund performance on a weekly basis in this supplement. The information is compiled by Moneymate and can also be found in greater detail on the Moneymate website www.moneymate.ie. It is very important to remember, however, that past performance is no guarantee for the future. This is not simply a tagline forced on institutions when advertising by regulators. Recent studies have shown that an analysis of the figures bears it out.

Some fund managers perform better in a rising market; others thrive relative to their peers when markets are falling. In some cases, fund managers have greater expertise in specific sectors and do better when these are in the ascendancy. And, of course, managers move from one fund to another. The fact that a particular fund did well under one manager is no guarantee that it will do equally well under another. This is the sort of specialist information that your adviser should be able to provide. Publications can examine the theory of investment but, because there are so many variables - affecting both performance and individual investor's requirements - it would be impossible to produce a book relevant to everyone's particular requirements.

Bacon report

I know how annoying it is to try to find your way around the Internet with incorrect URLs or site addresses, so I fully understand the frustration of Ms M.G., who takes me to task for twice printing an inaccurate Web address in recent weeks.

I inadvertently used a dot instead of a slash in the address for the third Bacon report which is available on The Irish Times website at:

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/special/2000/bacon/bacon report.pdf. Of course, you will need an Adobe Acrobat reader to download the file but that is available free at www.adobe.com.