A flotation of Inntrepreneur moved a step closer yesterday as the Department of Trade & Industry released the company, one of the UK's largest chains of pubs, from a raft of restrictions and freed its tenants from their obligation to buy beer only from Scottish & Newcastle.

Regent Inns is the sort of company that makes novice investors think they've become stock market gurus. Floated at the equivalent of 18p four years ago, Regent's shares have risen in a more-or-less straight line to yesterday's 369p. If only it were always this easy, we'd all be on the beach by now.

Pub chains have been one of the easiest ways to make money so far in the 1990s, both for those lucky or astute enough to set them up and flog them on to the majors and for other shareholders who have ridden the wave. Discovery Inns, yet another product of the 1989 beer orders, is the latest to jump on the bandwagon - after pricing in early December, the shares should be trading by Christmas.

The managing director of the fast-growing pubs group JD Wetherspoon is set to walk away with more than pounds 850,000 after his unexpected resignation yesterday "to pursue other interests".

Four more fortunes were made last year in the booming managed pub market as the executive directors of runaway success Regent Inns exercised share options to make a combined paper profit of over pounds 7m.

Bass has joined Whitbread and Rank in the rush by Britain's large leisure companies to buy up the booming themed bar and restaurant sector. It has emerged that Bass made a unsuccessful bid to buy the Pitcher & Piano chain of bars earlier this year but lost out to Marston, Thompson & Evershed. Marston secured the seven outlets for pounds 20m in June.

Enterprise Inns came to the market last November bravely flying the tenancies flag in the face of a stock market in love with the idea of the glossy managed pubs run by companies such as Tom Cobleigh, JD Wetherspoon and others. We were not alone in questioning whether the company would succeed in its bid to persuade the City that it was anything other than a rather dull rent collector and thought its price-earnings ratio of 9 at 145p was harsh but appropriate.

JD Wetherspoon has grown from a single pub to Britain's biggest chain by volume of beer sold. Founder Tim Martin explains how he turned it into a thriving business valued at pounds 342m.

Pub management companies, a relatively new breed as far as the stock market is concerned, continue to command glamour ratings, with JD Wetherspoon leading the pack.

The rise and rise of JD Wetherspoon is a marvellous corporate success story. Founded in 1979 by a Kiwi barrister who liked his local pub so much he bought it, the chain came to the market in 1992 with 44 pubs and has since grown to over 130. Since flotation, the shares have soared from 160p to 743p yesterday, up 21p after the announcement of another strong set of interim profits.

INVESTMENT COLUMN

INVESTMENT COLUMN

The fall-out from the Government's Beer Orders continues to reap rich rewards for JD Wetherspoon, the South-east-based pub retailer.

THE fast-growing pub group JD Wetherspoon hit out yesterday at what its chairman, Tim Martin, called the 'anti-free enterprise tactics' of its big rivals Grand Metropolitan, Whitbread and Allied Brewers.