Why is it that some people are successful investors?
After all, they can’t be that much different from everyone else, so what is it that allows them to choose investments that are profitable?
Imagine if you were to ask this question to ordinary people you met on the street. No doubt you’d get a range of different answers.
Typically, people believe that others are more successful investors because they are rich or because they have inside information on which shares are going up. Some will tell you that it’s because they are smarter than the average person while others write it off to some investors just being plain lucky.
All of these answers are wrong. In reality, the reason some people are successful investors is that these people “know how” to invest.
When you think about it, it makes sense. So how do you get “investment know-how”?
Investment know-how comes from two things.
A) Education – Investing is like anything else. You have to learn how to do it.
B) Experience – Once you have learnt the theory you still don’t have investment know-how until you’ve put it into practice for a while… and probably made a few mistakes along the way.
So, the short story is that you can get investment know-how but you’ve got to be prepared to spend some time educating yourself and gaining some experience.
What this Course is About
This course has been written to give you an insight into some of the principles of investing. In particular, it is very important that you have a system or a plan when you start investing and by the end of this you should have a good understanding of what trading involves.
So, if you want to be successful and you want to have investment know- how, you’ll soon come to realise that it’s all about your trading system. The following chapters illustrate some of the key principles that you’ll need to include in your trading system.
Throughout this course we will be talking about shares but the principles can be equally applied to any financial market investment including commodities, options, futures or foreign exchange.
Active Investors vs Passive Investors
There are two types of investors – active investors and passive investors. A passive investor is someone who owns investments in the share market but who doesn’t actively follow the performance of their investments or buy and sell on a regular basis. With compulsory superannuation, most of us are actually passive investors, with our investments managed by our superannuation fund. Many people also have some additional investments in managed funds or shares.
This course is designed for people who are interested in self-directed investment. By this, we mean someone who is interested in managing some or all of their own investments. In other words, if you want to do some of the buying and selling of shares yourself.
Active investors are also sometimes known as traders and that’s what we’ll call them in this course.