Ego trips key to share buying

IF there is one thing bigger than Marks & Spencer, it is the egos of the men battling for control of the company together with their associates, rivals and friends.

These are people who have got to the top in various branches of retail and business not by stepping aside for colleagues or compromising but by single-mindedly pursuing their goals.

Capitalism is about the survival of the fittest, and these are the fittest to survive - particularly in retail where understanding what sells and why is key.

People like this have a different attitude to money. Most people want money for what it will buy them, but not to the exclusion of everything else. People with the character trait that gets them to the top in retailing want money as an external demonstration of how successful they.

A generation ago, Bernie Cornfeld, founder of Investors Overseas Services, the world's first truly international mutual fund group, would ask aspiring salesmen 'do you sincerely want to be rich?' because only the tiny minority who said that they 'sincerely' had the motivation he wanted in his sales force.

It is much the same in retail. Those at the top tend to be a self-selecting group with a huge insecurity that fuels their need to succeed. Stuart Rose could not bear to be out of the limelight after he sold Arcadia. They don't want money to be able to spend it. They want it to prove to their peers that they have been able to make it. However rich they may be, they have continually to demonstrate that they are still top of the heap and smarter than the next man.

Making a pile of money by watching the way the wind was blowing at M&S is necessary because they have a constant need to show their rivals that they are plugged in and know what's going on.

They do not need to know the detailed timing of when a bid might come. It is enough to show they know a bargain when they see one. A bit of clever dealing proves they are as smart as they ever were - they still have an edge.

In this context, the surprise in the news that several of them have been piling into M&S shares is that anyone should be surprised. The man in the street, or the average taxi driver, certainly would not be. Anyone in the media who professes surprise is either disingenuous or naive, for this is what these guys do. They have succeeded in business because they have a sixth sense for value and a bargain.

They live and breathe the gossip. When Sainsbury's finally gets its bid, its register will most likely have a similar pattern of dealing. Debenhams probably did before its takeover.

This does not make the dealings sinister, and it is a pity the Financial Services Authority, which never used to confirm or deny anything, has confirmed the suspicion that it is probing the dealings.

One suspects this report is politically inspired. Marks & Spencer is so high-profile that politicians are likely to get wound up - particularly when some of those involved, such as Michael Spencer of Icap, are supporters of the Conservative party, and recently of the UKIP.

In these days of defensive regulation, the FSA has to operate ever mindful of what the politicians would expect, whether or not it is a sensible use of its limited resources.

I get the impression it has acted to pre-empt difficult questions from MPs - even though it must feel that the odds on any of these names ever being called to account for breach of any law are very long indeed.

Sound logic

IF mobile phones had been able to deliver high-quality music when they first became ubiquitous, no one would have invented the iPod. That at least is the contention of network operator T-Mobile, which today launched a new mobile phone service dedicated to the downloading of music together with a new handset which, it says, has hi-fi-quality sound.

It is an interesting idea. Apparently after 25 years, there are still only 250m Sony Walkmans in the world whereas there are more than a billion mobile phones in active use. The number of mobiles therefore dwarfs even the grandfather of the music headset, let alone youthful upstarts like iPod and similar devices for playing downloaded digital music.

T-Mobile hopes it will be a good business. It intends to charge roughly twice as much as a legal download for an iPod but thinks it will be competitive because its handset is much cheaper to buy and much more useful.

This assumes, of course, that it is correct in identifying iPod as the competition at a time when the bulk of digital-music downloading remains in the realm of illegal but free file-swapping.