Patience is clearly not a virtue held in high regard by the Babes in the Wood investment club. The amateur investors from Derby, whose fortunes we have been following since October, have ditched one of their acquisitions after only two months.

Conister Trust, a credit provider based in the Isle of Man, is being reignited by a high-powered team led by Jim Mellon, a hedge fund manager who has taken a 29 per cent stake and replaced the board with a number of top business figures. But Mr Mellon was clearly not moving fast enough for the Babes. Having bought the shares, quoted on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), at the beginning of March, they sold in early May for a modest 2.5 per cent gain.

Barry Wilkinson, the club’s treasurer, says: “We got that one about three months ago and have just been following it. We were hoping, after the changes were made, that it would turn around.”

However, the shares’ glacial pace was too slow for Mr Wilkinson, whose eye was caught by something moving much faster. “We have been watching shares in Twenty plc,” he says. “They were 14p and I looked again two weeks ago and they had moved up to 16p, but we missed out on that and eventually paid 17.75p. They are now about 19p.”

Twenty is a tiny company with an interesting story behind it. Originally traded on Ofex, the small company stock market now called Plus Quoted, Twenty came alive in April last year when it moved to AIM. The former shell company’s promotion coincided with it raising £8.4 million and buying Dataforce, a marketing and customer relationship management company based in Northampton.

The transformation of the business was backed by a number of investors, including Vincent Tchenguiz, the property mogul, and several tax-privileged venture capital trusts run by fund managers Close Investments, Northern Venture Managers and Octopus Asset Management. As a result, Tchenguiz’s vehicle, Consensus Business Group, and a VCT managed by Close control about 40 per cent of the shares.

With customers such as Pedigree Masterfoods, Tesco Club Card and the RAF, Twenty continues to excite these professional shareholders. One told us that he would back the management team, led by Ian Lancaster, the chief executive, to run a much larger business. He also suggested that the shares remain modestly priced, trading on a forward multiple of ten times expected earnings for this year of 2p a share.

Mr Wilkinson agrees with that assessment and says: “I reckon the shares should go to 25p in three to six months. That would give us a 50 per cent return.”

While their own share trading has been relatively modest lately, the Babes continue to look for interesting opportunities. “On the watch list is Amstrad,” Mr Wilkinson says. “We have been looking at it for three to four months. One of the group was keen on it at 160p but I said: ‘No, we will watch that and track it over three to four months and see what else Sir Alan has up his sleeve’.”

Times Business News reporter Joe Bolger analyses the prospects, below, for Amstrad and its colourful chairman, Sir Alan Sugar. But the Babes are not restricting their interest to the electronics industry.

“The other one that we have been keeping an eye on is the building trade,” Mr Wilkinson says. “There are a lot of builders with a fair bit of land lying around – not the larger builders but the smaller ones.”

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