Investment Attributes: Curiosity

By
There are certain attributes that a person can develop to help them succeed in any activity.  To use a sports analogy there are certain muscles or body systems that are key for certain sports. You don't need great endurance for weightlifting and you don't need incredible power for long distance running.

So what are the skills or attributes needed to be a good investor?  I will list a number of them and will try to talk about one each month going forward.

In my opinion the following attributes are key to becoming a successful investor.

Curiosity, Patience, Humility, Conviction, and Discipline

Curiosity:

All great investors are curious by nature. They want to know how things work. They often enjoy puzzles and riddles. They love to learn about new companies and industries. They are also curious about what could go wrong and what could go right. They research and analyze and ponder upon their investments and the mentality of the markets. They are open to new ideas and to changing their opinion. They don't assume they know. 

Some ways you can increase your curiosity include: 
  • Keeping an open mind as you look into investments - if there is something you are biased against try building an argument for that investment.
  • Learn about something new, that you have not understood before - maybe it is space travel, or DNA sequencing, or how ant colony's work.  The more systems and things you understand the better equipped you will be to understand potential investment opportunities.
  • Ask open ended questions of others, especially when you think you know the answer and the person has a different view, and then see if you can see the issue from their perspective. You don't have to change how you think but it will expand your perception if you can understand how others see various issues.
  • Focus on the mysteries of life, give yourself time to let your mind wander and think upon the fantastical.
A deep curiosity will help you find and analyze investment opportunities much more efficiently.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is all the fuss about Bitcoin?

By
Image
"Lack of Clarity gives Birth to Disappointment" ~ Dan Rockwell Bitcoin's meteoric rise What Is Bitcoin? Everyone is talking about it, but what is it? At the most basic level it is an electronic voucher that says you own it (sounds redundant, no?). It is an electronic record stating who owns how many "bitcoin". There is no physical thing that is a Bitcoin, no one has ever seen, or touched, or tasted one. Its power comes from something called the "blockchain" which makes it (to date) impossible to hack or replicate. So although it is nothing, it is not (currently) replicable or hackable and it is transferable (kind of like money without the paper and metal). The blockchain allows for the exchange and creation of more Bitcoin without a third party middleman. No bank is needed to verify the transactions or to store the Bitcoin or validate their authenticity. No one but the blockchain "system" can validate exchanges or create new vo
Read more

The Retirement Question

By
Image
I have had many people ask me the very difficult question: When can I retire? Most people are looking for an age but underlying this question is a dollar amount. What we really want to know is "When can I retire and live comfortably for the rest of my life without financial worries?". The answer to this has just as much to do with your retirement savings as it does with your age. Without a crystal ball, there is no way to know the exact answer. So like most things, the answer is, "it depends". There are so many unknown's (how long will you live, how will your spending habits change, what will your investment returns look like, what will inflation do)?  But there are also some things that we control and those are what I would like to analyze together. To do this, we will look at the retirement related decisions we make and their impact on retirement age (holding all the unknowable things constant). We will find that decreasing spending is more powerful t
Read more

Crypto Currency - Just A Worthless Commodity

By
 Prediction: At some point Crypto Currencies will all become worthless. I know that this is a strong statement that will irritate many but a review of the facts about the underlying basis for its value can lead to no other conclusion. Crypto Currency Dynamics: The brilliance of cryptocurrency is in its structure which gets rid of the need for intermediaries in its monetary system. No Governments or banks needed.  This is brilliant. The cost of intermediaries on a system is high, I won't go into that but if you look it up there is plenty written about it. Demand for crypto is strong and growing. People are learning about this new interesting monetary tool and seeing some get rich and it is very enticing. People are justifiably curious and more and more people are dipping their toes into the space. The Crypto Currency Myth:  Supply of crypto is limited. This is the crypto lie that everyone seems to be swallowing. The whole valuation argument for crypto is that it is limited and no o
Read more