Visitor: Nowadays value analysis is unfashionable. Is the trend also your friend?

RouteMaster: Yes. Like a chameleon, Investors RouteMap can be whatever you want it to be. If you are only interested in trends, we can offer them in four varieties.

Since we are on to economics, let's show you the Key Indicator, which is generated by our own econometric models for each country. These are fed by consensus forecasts of key economic variables.

While such forecasts can be wrong and all models of necessity over-simplify, we don't actually need a high degree of accuracy - the right direction and order of magnitude will do for our purposes.

The Key Indicator that we have found best to explain performance  will be the same across all regions but will vary from one asset class to another. Subscribers can see the full set of indicators in Profiles, a descriptive summary of each asset class.

Incidentally we hope you have already spotted that everything except the new explanatory variable is the same as in the last chart. This is part of our strategy to make complex analysis easily visualised by letting you see the same information in the same place as each new chart overlays the last one.

This indicator normally moves inversely to share prices. In this example the left-hand vertical axis is shown rising in the conventional manner, but it would be easier to see the relationship if the scale were reversed, which is standard operating procedure for the RouteMaps.

As you can see, it is not perfect. It peaked before the Millennium bubble and reached its nadir before the bottom of the bear market, which are the sorts of problems one prefers, but it did not predict the 2008 financial crash. This demonstrates the importance of basing investment decisions of a variety of factors, as we do.