The IRS Report has been published since 1991 and is edited by Chris Gilchrist.

It is not just another "tipsheet" but covers all styles of investing. There are four regular contributors.

• John Snowden
  
  
• Peter Shearlock
  
  
• Deborah Owen
  
  
• Douglas Moffitt
  

Chris Gilchrist is the editor of The IRS Report and has been since it was launched in 1991. Chris is an experienced investor and has been writing about finance for over 30 years. During this time he has been a lecturer, TV and radio broadcaster and financial commentator. As well as editing The IRS Report, he has also written for many of the national newspapers including The Sunday Times, The Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph and worked on financial programmes for Channel 4, BBC 1 and BBC Radio 4. He is a director of investment advisers Churchill Investments PLC.

Chris researches investment funds including investment trusts, exchange traded funds, covered warrants and structured products, all areas where innovations have created opportunities that few investors understand. Chris has been running his own SIPP for a decade and believes most people can achieve superior results by taking charge of their own pension fund as well as other investments.

“The financial services industry in the UK is enormously profitable. It is your money they turn into profits. Charges on most financial products are way too high and - unlike the US - there is no serious price competition. That means it really is important to find value for money. I no longer find many conventional funds that meet this criterion and instead find investment trusts, covered warrants and Exchange Traded Funds more useful.

Investors moving into retirement are today concerned about limiting downside risk and the best way to do this is by applying asset allocation methods to non-correlated investments. I suspect many investors don’t spend enough time on this aspect of portfolio management.”

John Snowden is a specialist in finding outstanding smaller company investment opportunities. He has been writing for The IRS Report since 1992. Most of his recommended companies are traded on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), but occasionally he will also find opportunities on PLUS and the LSE.

John started his main career nearly 40 years ago at J. Henry Schroder Wagg. Starting at the bottom, John worked his way up, becoming a member of the investment management team. He later got to know Nigel Wray and started writing for the Fleet Street Letter, Britain's oldest financial newsletter. He started writing for the Penny Share Guide at its inception and was editor for some five years as it grew to become the UK’s largest subscription newsletter.

During his stint with Fleet Street Publications, he also started the New Issue Share Guide. Other writing credits included editor of Penny Share Focus and an AIM newsletter specialising in smaller companies

John now relies on profits from his investments to supplement his pension income, and has painstakingly acquired the skills to use the data available on the internet, charting tools and so forth. While he is fairly active in trading on the Footsie and in major index companies, his main focus is in searching and finding small company shares capable of delivering big profits to investors over a period of years.

John applies stop-losses to all his recommendations, since long experience has convinced him that taking a small loss often saves you from a much larger loss, especially when investing in smaller companies. His record shows that the big gains on winning stocks far outweigh these small losses, which are simply part of the price you pay to secure those big winners.

With his peripatetic lifestyle including Norway, Surrey and Thailand largely financed by investing, John has become a "silver surfer", but as subscribers know, his nose for profitable small-cap opportunities remains as sharp as ever.
“Even as I start a new life as a pensioner, I remain an avid fan of smaller companies and enjoy reading about the new emerging businesses of today. I still kick myself for abandoning some successful companies too early as one is always tempted by new ideas. There are lots of average and poor businesses out there and I have built up a fairly sensitive antenna over the years creating my own methods of finding good ones.

The recent volatility in the markets creates havoc with my stop losses at times but on balance, good value usually wins the day. “

Peter Shearlock applies value investing principles to selecting UK companies for investors who aim to buy and hold for several years. Academic studies confirm that the value approach consistently beats the market.over the long term, making this an ideal way of managing the core of your share portfolio.

In The IRS Report, Peter researches companies that meet his own stringent value tests. These are companies that he considers undervalued by the wider stockmarket or which have potential for recovery from some form of setback. He normally restricts his search to the top 350 UK companies by market capitalisation.

Undervaluation can arise because investors focus on the ‘old’ rather than the new aspects of a business
-- and larger companies usually have several divisions or business areas, so a dull old business can often contain a rising star. Sentiment can turn against an entire sector -- as with banks or REITs recently. Or investors can simply become too pessimistic about a company’s prospects.

In line with value investors generally, Peter has adapted Benjamin Graham's original principles to suit modern conditions, but still emphasises the fundamental virtues – a sound business model, strong finances and firm management – as a guide to finding quality investments that can often be held for many years while providing rising dividends and steady capital appreciation.

Peter has been researching companies for over 30 years. He is the former City Editor of the Sunday Times, for which he writes an investment column.

“For me, value investment is about fundamentals over fashion. The key is to stay focused on factors such as long-term cash generation, management quality, dividend-paying capacity, financial strength and asset-backing and ignore the vagaries of shifting sentiment. As Benjamin Graham, the Godfather of value investment, pointed out, if you can buy a share at a discount to what it is inherently worth you are cushioned for whatever the world may throw at you.

Undervalued shares are often found in unfashionable sectors. Those sectors can remain unfashionable for months or, sometimes, years. The value investor must be patient, prepared to take a long-term view of his or her investments. But experience shows this approach pays off in the end.

Above all, value investment is about discipline. Warren Buffett, the fabulously successful US value investor, famously refused to join in the dotcom boom on the grounds that he wouldn’t buy what he couldn’t understand. It stood him in good stead. Too often, investors are more worried about missing out on the New Big Thing than finding an underpriced bargain. As Christopher Browne of Tweedie Browne puts it: ‘Risk is more often in the price you pay than the stock itself’. Remembering that is the key to successful value investing.”

Deborah Owen is one of the UK's foremost technical analysts. She is managing director of Investment Research of Cambridge, publishers of technical services, and edits the journal of The Society of Technical Analysts. She has written extensively about technical analysis and regularly presents seminars on its application by non-technical investors.

Deborah uses her extensive knowledge of technical analysis to write about market trends and identify potentially profitable situations.

Today, the availability of a huge mass of data on the internet means almost all traders use technical analysis- some do so almost exclusively- in setting entry and exit points from short-term positions. That means even investors using mainly fundamental factors to buy investments need to take account of technical factors. And in fast-traded markets like gold, commodities and foreign exchange, technical factors often drive markets for long periods during which the fundamentals remain unchanged.

Unlike many technical analysts, though, Deborah backs her analysis with reference to the underlying fundamentals. For IRS Report subscribers, she focuses mainly on identifying turning points in major trends in the major stockmarkets, gold, exchange rates and commodities.

“Behind the day-to-day fluctuations of the markets there are clear cycles that repeat themselves more frequently than the laws of chance would allow. Understanding the causes of these underlying trends allows both long-term investors and short-term traders to improve their chances of investment success.

Basically, technical analysis acts like a radar screen, picking up on the forces of supply and demand that create the trends that we see the markets. Whether they realise it or not, almost all investors adopt some form of trend following or momentum techniques -- even if it is just letting their winning trades run and cutting their losses quickly. In a recent study using data going back 100 years Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton of the London Business School conclude that “momentum has been a feature of the UK stock market for over a century. It is persistent and pervasive, and it is not subsumed by other market-wide factors.”

Trend identification is, therefore, the key to successful investing.”

What I conclude from this is that I must be my own investment manager for the years when my standard of living will be funded by my skill in creating a rising investment income.”

As well as these contributors, several other financial experts regularly write for The IRS Report. These include Roy Tipping, who reports on companies on the basis of his own momentum-based mathematical program "Tipping's Mathematical Ratio", and John Mulligan, who uses his STAR program to screen companies in the FTSE 350 Index to find high-yielding shares with sound fundamentals. Warren Perry and Mark Dampier regularly write about collective investment schemes in The IRS Report, identifying top-performing unit trusts, OEICs and investment trusts with a sound management team to continually deliver outstanding results. Chris Gilchrist also contributes incisive features on investment strategy and tax planning.