Mark Goodson has a skill. He gets a group of investors together, forms a club, and proceeds to make shrewd investment decisions. He's also written a successful book on the sudject. TOM KING went to gets some tips

An appointment with a "registered trust and estate practitioner and will specialist" does not exactly fill one with confidence of a riotous time ahead.

Mark Goodson, however, is everything that you least expect from a man in a supposedly hidebound profession.

He is the best of good company, and full of colourful, if anonymous, tales about inheritance battles and scams.

"Anyone who knows me will confirm that being unstuffy is what I'm about," says Mark. Yet absence of pomposity and solemnity hasn't affected the Goodson family business -- founded by Mark's father Frederick -- which visibly booms.

Dealing with the desires of the departed keeps Mark on his toes, yet he has also found the time and energy to write a best-selling book.

"I'd head home, have dinner, then settle at the computer at around 9.30," says Mark. "Quite often I'd wake up about two in the morning and find myself still there."

The result of these labours is the Motley Fool's Guide to Investment Clubs, which now sits in third position in the Sunday Times list of business bestsellers, just behind Richard Branson's autobiography. The book's success is an indication of the growing passion for amateur share-dealing. It is a pastime where Mark, while adopting the motley of the fool, is actually a king.

Mark Goodson is a natural Fool. If he hadn't discovered the Motley Fool -- the internet-based organisation designed to spread and share good investment advice among "ordinary" people -- he would have had to invent it.

Like Mark, the Motley Fool is resolutely unstuffy, approachable and humorous. Yet the Fool's track-record over seven years' existence is already vastly superior to that of the overwhelming proportion of sometimes snotty professionals.

As Mark puts it: "You don't need to be a financial expert to take your own financial future into your hands. I'm not a financial expert."

Yet there was something more to Mark. He had -- and retains -- a track record in investment that is little short of fabulous. His first investment club won the 1998 Proshare award.

He has already founded four local investment clubs, and now has a rolling programme: a new club every two and a half years. He has to keep starting new ones, because nobody -- quite understandably -- wants to leave the old ones.

He also has a realistic target. On the basis of each of 20 members contributing £25 per bi-monthly session, in 30 years time the total share worth of his clubs should be £780 million.

However, Mark doesn't allow cosmic figures like this to go to his head. He half-mockingly dismisses his own chairman's role as: "the bloke who breaks up fights and calls the beer breaks." And he sticks to his day job, which he loves.

There is a link between share dealing and work on wills. Both are superficially about pounds sterling, but really about people. "Forget science, look at human nature," is Mark's advice.

"I left school at 16 with no great interest in psychology," he says. "But along the way I've found it increasingly interesting how people react to situations. Apply this knowledge to the stock market and it's surprising how effective it can be."

Aside from the work that he relishes so much and the investment activities that make him the most sought-after fellow on the block, Mark says, hardly surprisingly, that his main hobby is "sleeping".

The process of becoming extremely rich is enough motivation for anybody to do anything. Yet you can't help wondering. Mark drives an ordinary car, lives in an unpretentious Westcliff house and took his last holiday in a caravan. The lavish lifestyle clearly doesn't carry a lot of weight for him. So what is the point of all that paper money?

A sneaking suspicion arises. Could share-dealing be an end in itself? However, Mark is indeed able to see beyond the wonder of the rows of noughts, and envisage what they might mean in terms of life.

He says that the average pension is a poor thing, and that investing is his way of saving for retirement.

One day, too, those paper shares will open up a wider world, beyond cyber-cash. At present, Mark seldom leaves Westcliff. He explains: "My wife and I used to enjoy travelling a lot, but we've given that up since we had the kids. But in retirement we mean to see the world."

He admits that, however financially comfortable he may become, however many exotic cities there are to explore, "I'll probably never be able to walk away from it (share-dealing) completely."

Of course, investment can be a millstone as well as a corridor of gold, and men have blown their brains out for a bad tip. Mark's healthy attitude, though, is that it is not worth losing 40 precious winks over, still less the contents of your head.

At the end of the day, the investing Fool's number one wise message is this: keep it fun.

The one note of lamentation that intrudes into Mark's generally upbeat conversation concerns a recent night at Dirty Harrys. "We'd turned £24 into £64. Everybody got so excited that time went by and nobody got more than a couple of small drinks down.

"Okay, so we might have stood to make a small fortune that night. But that's not the point. It'sstill not worth missing out on a good drink."

Investment sense -- Mark Goodman insists that dealing in shares should always be fun. His book Motley Fool's Guide to Investment Clubs is currently in third position on the Sunday Times list of business bestsellers. The book's success is an indication of the growing passion for amateur share-dealing

Picture: ROBIN WOOSEY

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.