NOW I know how a salmon feels swimming upstream against the current. A month ago, I said I would think about buying some shares in Kingfisher, the B&Q and Castorama DIY chain, if they went below £2 again. Right on cue, they dropped to 180p, and then started moving up again. After some dithering, I bought at just under 191p.

That was a day before the company announced interim figures. These were not exactly spectacular – but then they were not expected to be. Importantly, the company held the interim dividend, which leaves the yield of 5.6% ahead of what you can earn on medium or long gilts.

Then came a torrent of selling. My purchase price was washed away as the shares fell 10% in two days. This was hard to take. All my certainties about value evaporated. For several days I questioned my whole approach to the market. I started pulling the first cork earlier each evening. As the Lloyd Bridges character in Airplane says: “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.”

Then something miraculous happened. Wall Street powered to a new high and Kingfisher’s shares shot back up. I live to fight another day.

Years ago, an old hand told me: “The time to buy is when it hurts.” And he was right. You only get bargains when everyone else is a seller. By the same token, you should sell when everyone else is a buyer. I always liked Nathan Rothschild’s comment that he made his money “by selling too early”.

But putting this into practice – particularly buying – is extremely difficult. It takes cojones. And every now and then it is bound to go wrong because what looks like a dip in the market turns out to be the lip of a precipice. With Kingfisher, my reasoning is that a strong asset base should underpin the shares, come what may.

I am kicking myself, however, for failing to pick up some Barclays shares while they briefly traded at under £6. I have mentioned the bank before as a candidate for the Heaven portfolio.

At below £6, the shares were offering yield of about 5.5% – and a very safe one at that. Given the problems I have had finding value in this market over the past year, I should have jumped in with both feet.

Clearly, there was a reason the shares were that low. Through its big investment-banking operation, Barclays Capital, it has been caught up in the credit crunch of recent weeks.

But we do know it traded profitably in July and August – even after marking down the value of all those dodgy securities that were the product of America’s disastrous sub-prime lending boom. Meanwhile, it looks as if the UK retail bank is starting to improve its returns at last.

But the key to the Barclays price lies with its intentions towards the Dutch bank ABN Amro, for which it has made a bid that many view as overgenerous. Happily, Barclays is no longer favourite to win ABN Amro and I suspect that, after the turmoil of recent weeks, its chief executive, John Varley, is now secretly pleased to sit this one out. Barclays shares have a lot of upside if the rival bid consor-tium, which includes Royal Bank of Scotland, wins out.

As it is, Barclays shares have picked up more than 10% from their low, participating in a rally that has encompassed bank shares worldwide ever since Citi-group owned up to nearly £3 billion of write-downs and losses last Monday. The mythical Martian, so beloved of newspaper columnists, would find all this hard to believe were he, she (or it) visiting Earth right now, but it is all down to the fact that share prices reflect expectations. Markets had feared the worst. When that didn’t happen, the sellers evaporated.

I sense that the next few weeks are critical for the market. More interest-rate cuts would keep the bull running along contentedly. Bears suggest that sooner or later the credit crunch will impinge on companies’ abilities to borrow, but that seems fanciful. All big companies have bigger credit facilities in place with their banks than they will ever need, while banks either lend or watch their business dry up.

But with gold hitting a 27-year high, albeit in depreciated dollars, some investors are clearly hedging their bets. Gold is the funk money bolt-hole. When there is panic in the air, big players turn to gold or US Treasury bonds. The gold price is saying we are not out of the woods yet.

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