It is fair to say that no one investment strategy has proven to be the definitive solution to successful stock picking. While certain approaches have been lucrative over specific time frames, very few can claim to have consistently beaten the market year in and year out.

As a rule of thumb, however, investors can expect to be well rewarded by adhering to principles which ignore the emotional element of investing and focus on the rational drivers of equity prices. As such, by investing in companies with characteristics such as strong business fundamentals, consistent growth in cash flows and superior management (which typically act in shareholders' interests), you can have a high degree of confidence in the longterm performance of your portfolio.

Nonetheless, as a Sharetrack investor with a short-term perspective, these rules do not hold hard and fast. Indeed, speculation may be the key to your investment success and, as such, you will need to focus very closely on what will be driving your portfolio of equities in the near future. Essentially, it is information surprises (i.e. unexpected news, whether good or bad) which causes volatility in share prices and your objective should be to take advantage of this volatility. For example, if you invested in the telecommunications sector, you would have benefited from a number of positive announcements in the past week. Cable & Wireless (up 7 per cent) cheered the market with the disposal of its cable laying operation.

Closer to home, enthusiasm emerged for Esat (up 16 per cent) given the rumoured likely success of its bid for Cablelink.

However, if you had invested in the Irish drugs company Elan (down 20 per cent), you would have suffered as the market reacted negatively to the announcement on its drug pipeline. Thus it might be worth bearing in mind whether the stocks you hold are likely to surprise the market in the coming weeks. For example, you might consider investing in companies which are likely to report results, or sectors which are currently witnessing a surge in corporate activity, such as mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. Is now the time for an information play?

Mark Donnelly is a portfolio manager in the private client department of Goodbody Stockbrokers