Investing as a career I

Investing is not a rocket science. You need not high IQ in order to invest. The only 2 criteria needed to ensure a successful investment are Firm Character and Knowledge, the sequence is important – without first criteria, second criteria only destroy you.

As Martin Whitman says:” "Many people on Wall Street know the price of everything but the value of nothing,", I would like to make some changes, “Many people in the market know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” The market mentioned here could be equities, real estate, commodities and so forth. In the era where the information is easily accessible, as long as you wish, you could get the Real Time pricing of any, being it an equity price that fluctuate minutes by minutes, commodities future or option that change every single minute, real estate price that change month by month. But, people should not forget that information is NOT knowledge as data is not information. The well sort and analyze data become information. While knowledge only obtained by the combination of information and Real Life experience that you learnt by hard. This experience is as precious as a rare diamond. People tend to think that as long as he is equipped with sufficient information, he could be success in investment. This mentality is totally wrong. If it is a case, a librarian would be a greatest investor for last century and a person who works in Google or Yahoo would be most successful investor in the world in this new century because they are surrounded by ton of information. But, in reality, this is not the case.

Be prepare that you will make many mistakes for the coming investment decisions. This is unavoidable. Warren Buffett did quite of number of mistakes, so did I. Though making those stupid mistakes, we learnt, we learnt by hard. One must not misinterpret that I am encouraging that we must make a lot of mistakes in order to be succeed in investment. As I mentioned, making mistakes is unavoidable, but one must make sure that the mistake that he made would not failed him forever. History already showed a harsh reality where the investors of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) lost billions of dollars as well as Japanese real estate investors who also suffered same fate as his counterparts in LTCM. Reason? Over leverage.