Maybe I’m just going a bit doolally in my old age, but it seems that I’ve completely turned my back on conventional wisdom. Like a three-year old, it seems that if somebody tells me I should do something, I actually go out of my way not to do it, or at the very least do the complete opposite.

For example, if you take the advice doled out freely by consumer car magazines (and beware if you do, as I know for a fact that many staffers on car mags have never actually parted with their hard-earned to buy such a thing as a car) you’d sink all of your money into a Japanese sewing machine with minimal depreciation, but would spend three times the difference having it inspected by professional Toms, Dicks and Harrys to make sure it hadn’t been scraped by a shopping trolley earlier in its life.

Any trader worth his salt knows different. His own car is invariably one of the following – a) something completely bonkers and lairy that you wouldn’t be able to insure if you didn’t have a trade policy; b) massively luxurious, rough around the gills and utterly unsaleable, but jolly nice to smoke around in; or c) whatever’s in stock that the tax has yet to expire on.

Such publications will also dispense invaluable wisdom that they frequently recycle from articles published decades earlier. Look at any used car buyer’s guide and you’ll find, for example, advice to not call an ad if there’s only a mobile number in it as it could be a fly-by-night.

Or, of course, it could be somebody with 1,500 free minutes a month and no need for a landline, or someone who’s sick to death of telemarketing calls to his or her home phone number from canvassing agencies.

Then there’s the age-old one – never buy a car without seeing it in the metal first. Anybody daft enough to hand over the cash before they’ve seen, touched or driven the vehicle they’re about to buy deserves everything they get in my book, but to actually bid and agree a price before you collect has become the norm these days. If you buy in an online auction and the vendor’s description turns out to be inaccurate, you can still walk away guilt-free. But if the car is as described, then in effect you’ve done your haggling by proxy, making the whole sales process cleaner and less awkward.

‘Never agree to buy a car over the phone.’ That’s another one. I’m sure the vast majority of Car Dealer readers would agree with me in saying that if they didn’t do that, then they’d never have any stock at all to punt around. Most of the metal at my end of the trade (sub-£5k, some lovely, some horrid but you take the rough with the smooth as it’s part of the job) comes to the likes of me via an underwriter, often from main dealers on first refusal before it gets thrown to the wolves at auction. You then do the maths on each car you get – sell as is, refurb and sell, punt out via the ‘PX to clear’ bit at the bottom of your ad, or chuck back into the auction where it belongs.

‘Some publications dispense wisdom recycled from articles published decades earlier.’

Defying conventional wisdom and taking risks is how you net a bargain, but even a dyed-in-the-wool trader like me sometimes takes an absolute flier, and that’s where technology is our worst enemy.

Recently, I have acquired a personal communication device named after a popular fruit of the forest; a kind of hybrid thing that’s half telephone, half laptop. It gives you all the speed and efficiency of the dial-up internet you used to have at home, coupled to the ability to take it anywhere and watch its little egg timer try to load a web page.

I was having dinner with Mrs M the other day at one of the West Midlands’ finest Beefeaters, when she popped out for her inter-course cigarette (I normally prefer the one just afterwards, if you get my drift). By the time she returned I’d logged onto eBay and inadvertently bought a super-rare Japanese luxo-barge that fired in me a bizarre kind of nostalgia for my main dealer days. So I’m now £225 lighter in the pocket and the proud owner of a Nissan Maxima. I refer you to clause b), paragraph three. Conventional wisdom defied, I’d bought the thing unseen, via a mobile number and over the phone all at once. Quite an achievement. Maybe next time I’ll try doing that with proper money…

Incidentally, whilst referring to my earlier comment, the editorial team at Car Dealer certainly don’t fit the car mag staffer mould. I’ve owned as many cars as I’ve had hot dinners and editor Baggott is such a skilled wheeler dealer he managed to almost double his money on a dog of a Volvo. If ever the mag goes tits-up, he’s getting a job on my lot.