How many shares should you have in your portfolio?

The more shares you have in your portfolio, the less damage any single disastrous investment will do to your wealth. But how many is too many? Matthew Partridge explains.

It's not often you get important investment lessons from popular TV programmes.

So it was nice to see that ITV managed to squeeze a warning to investors into one of the plot lines on Downton Abbey. The well-heeled Grantham family learned just how dangerous it is to put all your eggs in one basket, when they lost all their money betting on a single Canadian railway company.

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Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri