Mundy: Intuition - more than just a lucky guess?

Investec's Alastair Mundy argues intuition cannot beat studied investment models and deeper analysis of the marketplace.

Over a Christmas lunch last year, a friend told me he had purchased just one stock over the previous 12 months: BP. What is more, he added, he had not really conducted any research as he had simply used his ‘intuition’. This interested me on a number of levels – not the least of which was the attraction of making successful decisions with little work – so I nodded politely and decided to think about the concept further. It was not the first time I had heard mention of intuition in investment matters. Often you hear people say, ‘so and so has a good feel for these markets’ or some investo...