Even when the sun came out and England started tearing through the Indian batting order, Lord’s has been a depressing place in the past few days. It has been inundated with executives with the jitters.

The chairman of one of the biggest investment banks in London, for example, said he has just sold all his shares. When asked what he thought of the likely fallout of the US sub-prime market, he said: “I won’t tell you what I think. I’ll tell you what I’ve done. I have moved all my money, all my wife’s money and all our pension money out of equities.”

There may be many people who foresee continued long-term growth in the stock market, but these days it is not just the Met Office putting out miserable forecasts.

The bulge bracket chairman – he preferred anonymity, not least because there are a few thousand people who trade equities at his bank – is expecting a 10 to 20 per cent fall in UK equities in the next three to six months. He said he is not forecasting a crash, but a correction. Interest rates are up, economic growth has slowed and credit spreads have widened, all of which will encourage money to move out of the stock market.

While he knows his bearish views are not shared by many analysts and economists, his decision to pull out of stocks is based on a pretty compelling calculation. If he left his money in the stock market, he said, then there is the possibility of share prices rising by another 10 per cent, but also the risk of them falling by as much as 20 per cent. By putting his money on cash deposit, he can earn interest at 6 per cent. In essence, it is a safe bet which involved forefeiting only a 4 per cent upside.

The boss of one of Britain’s best-known retailers was at the cricket, he said, because things were so dreadful at work, there was no point sticking around the office. Half-a-dozen of his stores were closed around the country on Friday morning as a result of flooding. Others were hit over the weekend. And as the showers continued, they only made an already difficult climate worse: he noted that the discretionary spending of anyone on a £30,000 income has fallen by 25 per cent in the past couple of years.

Away from the cricket, the chairman of one of the country’s biggest law firms said he sensed that the long bull market is coming to an end. The firm’s real estate and commercial practices were a little quieter than they had been a year ago. And the partners had just decided it was time to start recruiting more people into the restructuring practice.

Anecdotal evidence of impending market turbulence is notoriously unreliable, but this is no time to dismiss forecasts of stormy weather.

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