Six out of the top 20 were in Surrey, although top was Edinburgh. In the bottom 20, you had Nottingham high up due to crime levels, and areas such as Hull, Islington in London, and Middlesbrough was number one.

Is this a useful guide for investors?

Well it is useful to see, but the most powerful thing to consistently see with many of the worst areas was the consistently low house prices that had all started to go up greatly, and the huge amounts of regeneration going into the areas. In Middlesbrough alone they are investing millions through the Tees Valley regeneration project .

Clearly as investors this is a great time to buy into a property market ie when it is relatively near the start of the cycle, with momentum building and regeneration going in. These are key indicators to look for in any property market.

I have spoken to several investors who were saying they were pleased to see the level of regeneration going into, Grimsby, for instance and the affordable levels of houses, backing up our thoughts and research.

Remember the choices of where to live and where to invest are completely unrelated. In fact I know a couple of investors who live in Surrey and have large portfolios in Hull, and investors living in Belfast, Edinburgh and Winchester who have their major portfolios in County Durham, Grimsby and Eastern Europe.

They have all been very clear on what they look for when they choose a place to live, and a place to invest!

The most common mistake new investors make is mixing up the two, and choosing an investment based on where they would like to live, and choosing for example a “lifestyle” choice somewhere exotic and sunny which will never make them money and they won’t even be able to go on holiday there as they can’t afford to cover the costs and go on holiday, or a swanky new build apartment and spending thousands on furniture as they could imagine themselves living there when they were younger!

Seems incredible, but too many people do it.

A good investment has nothing to do with discounts, free carpets or a free swimming pool and all to do with basic economics on supply and demand, local affordability and economic changes eg salary increases/decreases, tax changes, and changing lending criteria.

Always keep these thoughts and strategies completely separate, ie where you would like to live and where is a good investment.

1. Trend traders, these are traders that simply buy up trending stocks and sell down trending stocks. An up trending stock is a stock that keeps making higher highs and higher lowers. What a trend trader would do is get into this stock at their low and hold onto it until it stops making higher highs and higher lows. That is it. They do not necessarily have to look at the company’s fundamentals. If it is going up it probably has good fundamentals anyway.

2. Swing traders, these traders play off of support and resistance. Support and resistance are imaginary tops and bottoms of stocks. For example if a stock is bouncing between $51 and $60, $51 would be its support and $60 would be its resistance. What a swing trader would do is wait until this stock goes down to $51 then buy it. They might place a stop at around $48 so if it breaks lower they will only lose $3. Then the swing trader waits until it either hits his stop or resistance at $60. Let us look at what could happen here. If you are right you make $60-$51=$9 if you are wrong you lose $51-$48=$3.

That means you have a 3/1 risk reward ratio. If you win only 30% of the time with a 3/1 risk reward ratio you still make money. Risk reward is very important in swing trading most traders will not take less than a 2/1 risk reward ratio. Also because in a swing trading you will be wrong more than you are right you will need to only risk a small amount of your money in any 1 trade.

3. Break out traders; these are the opposite of swing traders. They want to buy stocks that break above resistance and sell stocks that break bellow support. Let us say the stock in the example above broke out to $62. It is now above its resistance of $60 now old resistance becomes support and it will probably go higher.

A break out trader would buy it here and follow the stock up. They would a stop bellow $60 and move it higher and higher as the stock goes up. Your trade ends when you get stopped out. How much higher to place your stop when a stock moves up depends on the trader. Some traders use a trailing stop that can put a stop a certain percentage below the stock’s price. Others, like myself, prefer to manually set the stop were they think is best. It depends on the trader.