Being a successful investor is not hard but it is more difficult than it looks. What makes it more difficult is not acquiring the mental skills you need. Accounting and basic mathematics can be learned by anyone. What makes it difficult is the emotional or behavioural skills you need. The [...]
If your experience has been anything like mine I'm sure you'll agree investing in a hot tip is a bad idea. 
Something I am sure has also cost you a lot of money.
Ignore it like the plague
This has resulted in me ignoring all investment tips like the plague. And what I recommend you do as well.
Read about my experience here
You can read about one of my experiences with an investment tip you can read the article Do you also get investment advice from friends and neighbours
We like a good story
The problem with investment tips are...
Are you a classic value investor?
Do you get excited the lower the share price of an undervalued good company falls?
Do you love sifting through the 52-week low, lowest PE or highest dividend yield list?
Something I used to do
I'm also a hard-core value investor but this is not something I do any more as I found an even better way to generate market beating returns.
Lead me explain.
Started the worst way possible
If you are a long time reader of my newsletters you will know that I started investing in the worst possible way.
Because of this I made every possible mistake an investor can make.
I started using technical analysis and lost money. I then followed brokers recommendations (traded a lot) but never made any real money until I discovered value investing which I have been studying and practicing over more than the past 20 years.
A new way of looking at value investing
However last year my approach to investing changed substantially.
Start Saving for Retirement as soon as you can, or…
As you know investing and retirement are closely linked.
And as a reader of my newsletters you know I am a passionate believer in planning for your retirement as early as possible.
Here are a few articles you may want to look at where I wrote to you about retirement:
What is money death and how you can avoid it
Living knowing your retirement fund is bankrupt
Slow motion train wreck – German demographics
A retirement plan for my father
Start as early as you can
I am thus very happy to post an insightful article written by Thomas Nashng at PensionReviews.com that shows you why it’s so important for you to start saving for retirement as soon as you can.
Dear Fellow Investor When you go fishing you look for the most comfortable spot next to the river or the sea or do you go to where the most fish are caught and start fishing there? You of course go where the fish are. Not what most investors do But [...]
Do you use a single valuation ratio (only price to earnings for example) when selecting companies for your portfolio? If so you may want to reconsider. The problem if you use only one valuation ratio is that it can, depending on market situation, lead to you significantly underperforming the market [...]
What Internet browser do you use?
I use Firefox mainly because it's got so many add-ons you can use to make your life using the Internet easier.
In this article I suggest the add-ons I find most valuable when looking for and researching investments.
I hope you find a few that can help you save time and get more done.
I have been an avid reader of Nate Tobik's (picture right) blog Oddball Stocks since around the start of 2011.
I can?t remember exactly how I found his blog but I think I stumbled over it when he wrote about finding attractively priced companies in Italy.
I wanted to interview Nate to find out more about his investment approach and because he can help you if you are a US investor that would like to invest in Europe as he has found a way of investing worldwide from the USA at reasonable brokerage rates.
If you are not US based I you will also find the interview and his blog interesting as his investment ideas are so far removed from what you see or read in the mainstream media.
Make sure you read to the end of the interview as Nate has got an interesting investment idea for you.
In January 2012 the Brandes Institute once again published a very interesting 32 page research paper called "Boomers Behaving
Badly: A Better Solution to the ?Money Death? Problem" that you will most definitely be interested in because it affects your retirement.
The paper tells you what you have to do to avoid "money death" - the risk that you run out of money during your retirement.
I'm sure you'll agree that the Internet is a wonderful thing, specifically as an investor.
The amount of information you can find on the company is truly astounding, investment opinions, newspaper and magazine articles as well as in a lot of cases analyst reports.
But does all this information equal knowledge? Do you believe that in order to generate market beating investment performance you need to know more than everybody else?
Less is more
This is what I always thought but to make sure this is right I looked for studies to confirm this. But I could not find any. In fact the studies I found said the exact opposite.
Even worse the studies found that as the amount of information increases it increases confidence rather than accuracy.
