Investing as a career II

Investing is a time consuming, labor intensive career. To ensure a successful investment, practically you need know almost all the known knowledge in the world, from economics, accounting, politics, psychology, meteorology…etc. After all, this knowledge is influential in determining 2 crucial factors that judging the up and down of the pricing, these two factors are Demand and Supply and Human Psychology.

To make a picture clearer, let me take you an example. If you intend to invest in McDonald’s equity, you not only need to know its figures shown in the book keeping, you ought to know other factors which are crucial as well. This could be the knowledge in animal husbandry such as how the cows and chicken been reared? What happen if the feed cost for the chicken raised when the price of corn and soybean rise in the commodity market? How about the change of climate would affect the price of those raw materials for the feed? What happen when the consumers are more health conscious? Will it affect revenue for the company in the Islamic countries since McD is a symbol of Americanism?

Though we need not to know the exact answer for those questions, we need to have an ability to relate all those seem unrelated issues into the judgment we make for the investment. This ability, for my opinion, is unlike other professional jobs which you could obtain through training, is far more like gifted talent. Professionals such as doctors, lawyers, engineers or even accountants are good in their professional career, but without this gifted talent, his investment, based on his training in his professional life will give him not a spectacular result but mediocre or even disastrous result. Investing, unlike other professional career, need not a professional but a commonist, someone who has vast knowledge in many areas and of course without a Firm Character, will not ensure his success in investment.