JESSE LIVERMORE made and lost four fortunes in the rough and tumble of early 20th century Wall Street. Nicknamed the Boy Plunger — he made his first fortune while other kids were still worrying about their acne but was clearly a bit of a spendthrift — he knew how to make money in the first place: by following the trend.

The big money, he said, was never made in the buying or the selling. “The big money was made in the waiting,” he said.

In my experience, that is one of the hardest lessons for an investor. The temptation to cash in and move on can be a powerful one. That is especially so after the sort of rises we have seen of late. No fewer than four of the big-value stocks that make up my Heaven portfolio have hit new highs in the past month.

With a lot of takeover bids in progress, the investment institutions should have a steady flow of cash for reinvestment — so I am not about to bet against the trend. But with the FTSE 250 hitting new highs almost daily, the top end of the market has had a dangerously frothy feel to it at times. What concerns me is that history might repeat itself. In each of the past two years, a firm start to the year has been followed by a soggy spring and early summer.

I have certainly been tempted to cash in at Mitchells & Butlers, the All Bar One to Harvester pubs and restaurants chain, where the share price has been boosted by takeover rumours. Granted, there has been plenty of corporate action in this sector, but the time to strike was surely two years ago when the shares were selling for less than their bricks-and-mortar asset backing. For the time being, I am doing a Livermore and holding on.

As it is, two stocks have gone from the portfolio and I have bought one new one. Saint-Gobain’s takeover of BPB has gone through and I have the cash in my bank account to prove it. I doubled my money in BPB in just 21 months. Thank you, Saint-Gobain.

I have also sold my Carillion shares, at 294p. I do not like the company’s move to buy Mowlem, the construction group, which to the untutored eye looks like a can of worms. Carillion has been pushed into raising its offer, to £313m, to head off a possible counter-bid from Balfour Beatty.

Takeovers rarely add value and I fear that taking Mowlem into the fold could prove as costly to Carillion as was the decision by the elders of Troy to open the gates to a wooden horse marked “made in Greece”. Carillion returned a 60% gain over two-and-a- half years.

I have made one opportunistic purchase: Bodycote International. Shares in this materials-services business fell 10% in the space of a few days last month following a trading update that was generally upbeat, but mentioned a slight slowdown in the rate of organic growth — from 6% in the first half to 5% in the second. Big deal.

The company has been transformed in the past four years. Some 40 plants have been sold or closed, the loss-making electroplating side has gone, and a dozen or more businesses have been bought to bolster higher-margin operations in heat treatment, materials testing and high-temperature pressing.

It may not sound exciting, but Bodycote is riding the outsourcing wave. Big companies are increasingly leaving this sort of work to specialists, Bodycote among them.

The firm had been on my radar for months, but looked to have got away from me. Having missed out on safety-equipment specialist Halma, which I mentioned here a month ago as a possible purchase, I was determined not to let the same thing happen again. The shares dropped to 204p at one point.

I paid 208p and they have since been up to 222p before slipping back.

There has been action, too, among the “all-or-nothing” stocks that make up my Hell portfolio. Goals Soccer Centres and Premier Research have been hitting new highs, and Minster Pharmaceutical has at least sprung into life again. Minster came to the market a year ago after reversing into a shell called RII. In an initial flurry of short-lived excitement, the shares hit 5Çp, before subsiding under a weight of selling.

But Minster does look interesting. It has two drugs under development — one aimed at the £1.1 billion-a-year migraine market, the other at schizophrenia and chronic diabetes. With 1.5 billion shares in issue (yes, billion), it is valued at about £36m. But if either drug made it to market, I suspect you could add a nought to that and still look pretty conservative.

The real excitement of the past month concerns Zareba, one of the two cash shells in the portfolio. The shares were suspended at 1.8p following news of a proposed reverse takeover involving a specialist fuel-processing business that is part of the Masefield energy-trading group.

Masefield is also behind Nautical Petroleum, the North Sea heavy-oil specialist that came to the market through a reverse takeover of Bullion Resources. That took the latter’s shares from 2p to 14p. Something of the same at Zareba would get the year off to a good start. One can but hope.