“Instant decisions are very often the ones you end up regretting. So you get to position yourself six to nine months before any big news that might happen. If it’s bad news – if, say, the whole board resigns – there’s very little you can do. If the share price gets slammed in a small cap, you take a step back. There’ll be no buyer for the shares anyway. You don’t get stewed up or depressed. You wait for the share price to sort itself out and liquidity to return.”

Cross interrupts our conversation to take two or three calls. For a man resisting the day-trader mentality, he is nevertheless intimately in touch with the price shifts and information flows of his companies and the sectors they’re in. But nothing will budge him from this verdant and unexpectedly balmy corner of Scotland. He moved here because his wife was brought up nearby. Now he argues the case for Perthshire as passionately as he would for one of his favoured companies.

“It’s the best all-round county and actually one of the sunniest places in Britain,” he says. “There’s a wonderful microclimate. Then there’s the space, the fishing, the hillwalking…”

He is just as evangelical about Anguilla, where he has a villa. For years, this was the least fashionable of the Leeward Islands; now it’s a booming centre for offshore finance and tourists seeking a less pre-packaged, glitzy experience than they might get on the larger islands. Cross bought his place between a devastating hurricane in 1995 and the island’s spectacular recovery, which saw the government issue a moratorium on foreigners buying land there. Pretty good timing.

Five minutes of his Anguilla pitch and I am itching to check the flights on Expedia. If Cross’s process of choosing property is anything like as rigorous as his system for stock picking, it might just be the best travel advice I’ve had all year.