News that an amateur has beaten the professionals in the stock-picking stakes always makes good copy for the financial pages and, since the crippling performance of world markets has been front page news for the past few weeks now, successful amateur stories have made it onto the news pages too.

Last week's amateur was four-year-old Tia Roberts whose notional portfolio (picked by grabbing bits of paper with company names on them) outperformed those of an experienced investor and a financial astrologist.

I did a bit of a double-take at the financial astrologer bit since they don't normally get included in these sort of contests but, yes, Christeen Skinner based her stock choices on planetary cycles. She may not have taken the impact of Mir's decaying orbit into account since her portfolio came off the worst.

Anyway, young Tia obviously has a career ahead of her in the stock market, should she wish it, since professionals, astrologists and amateurs alike are now looking for signs of recovery in what has been a particularly savage first quarter.

The reaction to the US Federal Reserve Bank's half-point cut had all the hallmarks of a market that now can't see the wood for the trees. In reality, the difference between 50 basis points and 75 makes damn all difference. The likely outcome of a 75 basis point cut would have been a short-lived rally followed by a decline.

It's perfectly clear that the Fed's rate policy is now one of easing, and comments from the Fed itself would lead you to expect that it will ease again reasonably soon, but there really wasn't any economic need for aggressive cuts.

The only reason would have been as a brief palliative for burnt out equity traders. Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, surely wants to leave himself with room for more, smaller cuts depending on the economic news that filters out over the next few months.

Meantime, the professionals are putting out commentary that is so self-evident that it makes you wonder why they're paid the six-figure bonuses. Telling investors that the technology and telephone sectors are likely to remain volatile and that you need to have stocks of companies that are soundly managed and have good growth prospects in your portfolio is straight from the Ladybird book of investing.

The reality is, of course, that they are the sort of stocks that should always have been in your portfolio but which were out of favour as long as the great techno-bubble spread over the markets. And which your stockbroker probably told you to sell to invest in halveyourmoney.com instead.

The professionals are also warning that, even in a recovery phase, stocks don't go up in a straight line. In fact most of them are saying that now is a good time to buy but that the market might still go down another 15-20 per cent.

In which case now is not actually a good time to buy. I do, in fact, subscribe to the theory that you shouldn't try to wait for the absolute bottom of a market before investing but in the current climate waiting until the banks and the fund managers have finished offloading their own portfolios mightn't be a bad idea.

There are now quite a number of analysts who are calling the bottom of the market over the next few weeks which may well be perfectly valid, but they are still the same people who were urging you to pile into to technology stocks last November so pinches of salt should still be taken when looking at any recommendations right now.

Of course the current technological gloom - where people complain about the uselessness of Wap phones and any other must-have wizardry of the past 12 months - doesn't mean that many of the developments that have occurred haven't been real and that their effect on the world economy won't be lasting.

There is no doubt at all in my mind that the benefits of greater stock control and easier communications due to technological advances have affected and will continue to affect company profitability.

However, there have been less e-conferences and getting-yourself-wired-up conferences for business over the past while which is probably no bad thing.

The last e-conference I heard about was in New York and it focused on the e-book concept. Naturally, since this type of thing affect me directly as a book person myself, I was interested to hear what they had to say. But the bottom line seemed to be that most publishers and booksellers felt that the most important role an e-book had was as a promotional and marketing tool for the actual published book (or p-book!) itself.

The industry was interested in the Stephen King project where the massively successful and technologically-aware author published an online book for which readers were supposed to donate something like $1 a download.

It was to be published in instalments and, unfortunately, paying the $1 was optional. Stephen King hoped that his readers would be honourable enough to make the payment but actually they weren't. (Why doesn't that surprise me?)

In any event, although there were over half-a-million downloads for the book (which, as far as I know, he didn't complete) this pales into insignificance compared to the multi-million sales of his p-books. And, apparently, the next best-selling e-book has clocked up a less than impressive 3,500 downloads. So the new technology is still well behind the old when it comes to reader preferences. Naturally, I'm perfectly happy to be paid for e-books or p-books, but I have to confess that, as a reader, I love the feel and the smell of paper more than anything else.

However, I do hope that when the telecom industry emerges from the pile of debt that it has amassed it will concentrate on providing cheaper and more useful services to customers. I see no reason while my mobile phone can't be plugged in and used as my land-line hardware too, or why an ISDN line should cost an extra £12 a month when all that's happening is that the same information is buzzing up and down it albeit a bit quicker.

Although my computer can send and receive faxes I don't have it switched on 24/7 (as they say) and so use a separate fax machine some of the time. But you can't buy a fax machine that has a cordless phone attached. You can use the cordless handset but that has to be plugged in to a separate base.

One day what people want and what the providers give them will be the same.