I was watching a film the other day and one of the comments that really hit home was 'Don't fight the market'.

Some of you may know the film 'Rogue Trader', which was based on the story of a futures trader in Singapore. The main character, Nick Leeson, was trying to manipulate the market, to his own advantage. Initially, his plan worked, but as time went on, the market moved away from him.

Instead of realising this, he attempted to recoup his losses by doubling his stakes, in the hope that his profits would double and therefore repay his losses.

Unfortunately, the market continued to move against him and his losses mounted to the point where he lost over 300 million, causing the failure of one of the oldest banks in the UK.

In short, he was trying to fight the market forces, rather than learning how to make money in a rising, falling or static market.

In a way, most property investors are gambling on the future prices of the housing market.

At the moment, there's a lot of talk about the UK housing market and people have spoken of falls over the next year.

This has scared a lot of people and many are waiting for the market to re-adjust before spending their hard earned cash, preferring to hold their assets in other forms, like shares or bank deposit accounts.

Like any market, house prices are governed by the simple laws of supply and demand.

If more people want to sell than there are buyers, then prices will tend to fall.

Conversely, if there are more buyers than sellers, prices will tend to rise.

However, people become so short sighted that they fail to see the bigger picture.

If the market continues to fall, or is said to be falling, property will be cheaper to purchase and demand for rental properties will increase. (people tend to delay purchase until the market has bottomed out)

For investors this is great news, as you can get substantial discounts if you're prepared to move quickly.

If the market continues to fall, the answer is to keep the property until the market recovers, you just need to make sure that the rent covers the mortgage.

If the market is static, there tend to be more properties for sale, as people are more likely to find willing buyers and also be able to find property to move to.

For investors, they know what they will need to pay to buy a house and what they will receive in rent.

Given that there will be more properties on the market, they can afford to be more choosy and either pick the best, or those with motivated sellers.

If the market is rising, the investor knows that the value of their purchase will rise.

The real issue is that in Western society, we seem to have a short span of attention.

We have become so used to having everything on demand that people become impatient after a very short space of time.

I'm as impatient as the next man, probably more, but we have to realise that some things take time. We don't expect a baby to talk after a few months, yet we look at the UK property market and investments on a monthly basis.

Anyone who invests in property should do so with the medium to long term in mind. We've all seen the TV programmes with people trying to make a profit in 3 months, when really we should be looking at a minimum of between 3 and 5 years.

So if you're looking at something that should grow over 5 years, whay are we so fixated on the value after 3,6,9 or 12 months?

If you take a snapshot of the property market, there will be periods when it falls, but they usually follow periods of high growth. Even now, the annual average for the Uk housing market is 16.8% growth, and that's with 3 months of decline. Source - Halifax

However the real question is whether you want to buy when everyone else is buying, or would you rather cherry pick the deals when no-one else is buying?

Whatever you do, don't tell the popular press what kind of deals are out there, as it will give the game away!