Our share tips made a solid start to the final quarter of 2015 with all four investment portfolios showing some improvement when we carried out our weekly review of progress on Wednesday morning.

But the overall gain was less than 1 per cent and lagged a useful recovery seen in the benchmark Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 share index as investors recovered their appetite for risk after the stock market shake-out.

Much of the blame was down to our safety-first approach to investment where we have held large cash reserves and avoided companies which are vulnerable to commodity and currency pricing.

That served us well in the recent stock market downturn but means we could miss out on a strong recovery in global markets.

At present, we are not convinced by the sudden popularity of bombed out oil and mining shares nor prospects for increased global trade in the face of the Chinese slowdown and the economic problems of emerging nations such as Russia and China.

But we moved to hedge our bets on Wednesday with a notional investment in oil heavyweight Royal Dutch Shell which can afford to pay fat dividends out of present earnings even without any sustained recovery in oil prices.

We accept that the payment may be cut by up to 20 per cent this year but that still means investors will pick up at least £50 annually from every £1,000 invested in the A shares which should provide a useful safety net over the medium term ahead of any real pick up in the market.

We also decided to jump the gun on next year's further privatisation of Lloyds Banking by making a notional purchase of the shares after the government finally drew up the timetable to end its costly exposure to the PPI scandal.

The prospect of big dividend payments is again the main attraction with most brokers looking for a a lift in the annual payment to around 3.9p a share in 2016.

We have set our usual stop loss targets on both shares at which investors should consider selling on a share price reversal.