Money magic - or make-believe?

Perhaps people are becoming desperate as the stock market plummets, but there is a surge of snakeoil salesmen promising unbelievable riches - as long as you first buy their unbelievably expensive seminars.

Jobs & Money has already exposed some of the methods employed by these self-styled investment gurus. So it was with interest that we received a review copy of How to Become a Millionaire by Jim Slater.

The name Slater will be familiar to anybody who remembers the City in the late 1960s. Mr Slater practically invented "asset-stripping" as he built a huge conglomerate that collapsed spectacularly in 1975.

It is common now to see articles that talk about how Mr Slater has been "rehabilitated" and indeed he recently staged a return as a director of a publicly listed company at the age of 73.

But while he may not be a seminar-circuit charlatan, the only revelation in this book is how much he is clinging on to absurd assumptions about stock market growth that would make even the most optimistic pundits wince.

He encourages homebuyers to take out an Isa-based mortgage, investing their cash in stock market funds. Likewise, you should ditch your endowment and invest the cash directly in shares yourself. With the "magic of compouding" you will soon be rich.

He bases it on "conservative" projections of stock market growth, of 10-15%. Yet the true average of the past 10 years has been only 6%, and it was projections of 10-15% that created the endowment crisis in the first place. Mr Slater's book is sub-titled Make Money While You Sleep, but it looks like he hasn't woken up and smelled the coffee for some time.