Investors will be given the chance to profit from the pollsters next month with the launch of a unique type of fund.

Called the YouGov Alpha, the fund’s core is on-the-ground research by YouGov, the pollsters better known for forecasting election results.

Their most recent success was correctly predicting that Boris Johnson would win — by the exact 53%-47% margin — the closely fought race to be London’s mayor.

“It is the first time this sort of information has been systematically put to use in the investment process,” said Chris Rodgers, founder of Four Capital Partners, a fund-management company that is partnering YouGov and taking responsibility for the actual investment decisions.

YouGov has 250,000 people on its panels, including 4,000 financial advisers capable of telling the pollsters which banks, insurance firms or fund managers are popular with the public.

Investors will get the benefit of YouGov interrogating its regular panels of members of the public, as well as specialist groups such as doctors or estate agents, to glean accurate and up-to-the-minute information that is not yet available from orthodox sources such as companies’ balance sheets or analysts’ research.

Doctors, for example, can tell the fund managers whether they are prescribing a pharmaceutical company’s new branded drug or the cheaper generic equivalent.

These “hot” insights will then be used to take views on pairs of target companies such as retailers Next and Marks & Spencer, or pub groups Punch Taverns and JD Wetherspoon.

The fund managers’ basic test will be whether what is being flagged up by the research — good or bad — is already taken account of in the share price. If they decide that it is not, there should be scope for making money.

The fund will then buy shares in the one of each pair it likes, and sell shares of the other. If the pollsters’ data is right, the fund and its devotees should gain.

One criticism of the fund’s market-research approach is that it restricts it to consumer industries and those sectors where there are plenty of independent businesses such as estate agents. This will make it difficult for the fund to gain an edge in engineering, manufacturers of heavy industrial equipment or oil and gas explorers, for example.

Rodgers brushes aside such concerns. “We will be covering only about half the stock market,” he said. “But that will not matter because this will be an absolute-return fund, profiting by holding shares that go up and by going short of shares that go down.”

Times Recommends

• How to profit from your holiday
• Is there anywhere left to make money?
• 10 sites that could change your life