Whats the painful and sometimes brutal truth about being a socially responsible investor or any investor for that matter? Its hard work.
When we were kids, what did we want to be when we were growing up? We all know what we ideally wanted to be as kids, a star athlete, a musician, pro poker player, actor or actress, model etc…but what kid in their right mind wants to be a professional investor? Well, I was one of those unusual types who should have been guided to counseling early on because I did want to be a professional investor. The graphs and stock tables in the Wall Street Journal fascinated me early on and that fascination remains to this day. But this is not an article about a childhood gone awry but a glimpse into the single minded vision that it takes to be good at most anything, including investing.
To excel at investing means to devote oneself to the prospect of focusing day in and day out on the investment process. What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong, and why? Its an internal process of identifying internal strengths and weaknesses as much as it the search for the undervalued asset. We all make mistakes at one time or another, including major mistakes but in the long run did we accept them as mistakes and learn from them, or do we remain in denial and continue as business as usual?
We probably all know investors who have this continual habit of buying near the top when their confidence is high and selling at or near the bottom when their confidence is in panic. For this reason alone one should really be looking into the mirror of themselves and determining whether they should be managing a portfolio for themselves.
For individuals and organizations who conduct their own investing, they must realize they’re in competition with others who have a single minded devotion to excelling in investing and are happily, even gleefully devoted to their profession.
Any investor, be it a pro or an do-it-yourselfer can run a hot hand for a limited period of time and delude themselves into being the new Master of the Universe. But what will it take for the successful investor to transcend short term progress to long term success? Its really simple as are most things in life, it boils down to limitless learning and plain hard work. When we were 20 something years old, we thought we knew it all. Nowadays for each nugget of knowledge I realized there remains a mountain of educational boulders waiting to be tapped.
To be continued……….
Be careful out there
Brad
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