TABLE OF CONTENTS Management is responsible for a company s success or failure, and the same is true of investment performance. Most often, investors and asset managers act according to certain guidelines which, however, are not universal and they change over time. For instance, many experts now believe that the buy and hold time of equities which prevailed in the decades after World War II is past. Therefore, a portfolio of securities has to be dynamically controlled.
Technical and fundamental analysis is a way of providing the needed control information.
But analysis also requires an inquisitive mind, lots of skill pertinent to investment and a great deal of homework.
Doing one s homework as an investor is a better guide than taking wholesale advice from experts. Still, the experts do matter (more on this later). The seventh golden rule for traders and investors is that they should always do their homework in a way which is meticulous but not arrogant. When people get a big ego, they acquire a one-track mind, forsake risk control and eventually pay dearly for this failure.
Your homework helps you to avoid the herd , said Gordon Midgley, adding that today there are plenty of investment research services to which individual investors can subscribe. The larger mutual funds, too, have Internet sites providing research advice to individual investors including charting. Moreover, the LSE has a question-and-answer course one can do via a personal computer.
Eventually, the user of such services can graduate to his or...
