"I found your comments from early October 1987 fascinating. I wanted to go back in time to see what you were saying at that critical moment.

"Here are my takeaways:

• The vocabulary and style of your writings then are almost identical to your audios now

• The market, fixed income and commodity comments recommended rules that, from what I can see, are the same as today

• Your dollar recommendation (weakness to be expected) was somehow right on after stock prices collapsed (today the USD seems to be a safe haven)

• Your gold recommendation was short term right (gold broke out) but long term wrong (it drifted lower for 15 years)

• FM had a managed portfolio with recommendations for buys, sells, and stops

• Your insistence that stops be used for every position must have made you a lot of friends over the following weeks

• The charts displayed were all point and figure although you did say that all chartists should be proficient in more than one chart type

"Do you mind sharing with me a snapshot of where your investing style was at that time and how it differs with today? What investment rules did you have then have you discarded, if any?

"Lastly, near the end of the note you said anyone who is "too busy" to look at their charts at least once a week should be in sales or administration rather than investing or trading. Amen."

David Fuller's view Good grief! Well, it has been a very long time since I last saw that. As for differences between then and now in my approach, I traded more back then. Today, I am certainly less interested in telling people what to do and it never really suited my temperament. The problem with model portfolios, as I have often said, is model for whom? We have a diverse subscriber base, mostly from institutional backgrounds. Today, I find interaction with the Collective via the website more interesting and informative.

I liked our hand-drawn P&F charts and without a fixed time scale one could fit more data in the narrow columns of a page. Candlestick charts barely existed outside of Japan back then and we could not produce them before the advances of computer technology. P&F is fiddly in terms of getting the scale right and fewer people understand it.

Other than getting older, I do not think that I have changed much in my analytical approach although I have a better understanding of the fundamental economic background, for better or worse. I have a lot more data at my fingertips, also for better or worse, but I find it interesting. I hope I am less brash.

The biggest difference, I believe, is not specific to me but to the long-term market cycle.

Veteran subscribers will recognise this because we were in a secular bull market back in 1987, albeit about to be dramatically interrupted by a short, sharp crash. My financial career started at the same time as a secular bear market, which I prefer to call a valuation contraction cycle to avoid confusion, from 1967 to early 1982. The next secular bull (valuation expansion cycle) commenced in 2Q 1982 and ended in 1999/2000. You can see the 1967 to 1982 secular bear even more clearly on the Dow. We are currently in another valuation contraction cycle which probably has a few more years to run (see also last week's comment on this subject).

Inevitably, it is much easier to do well in a secular bull (valuation expansion cycle), provided one recognises it. A secular bear (valuation contraction cycle) is considerably more challenging, particular if one does not recognise it. However, because shares are fundamentally better value, on average, in the latter years of a secular valuation contraction cycle, risks are generally lower although investors are likely to be more cautious because their expectations have been lowered over time. For instance, I maintain that we will not see anything close to a retest of the 2001 or 2009 lows by the S&P 500 Index for the duration of this valuation contraction cycle and we currently have a medium-term cycle of higher reaction lows. I am hoping to live well into the next secular bull which should see me out.