Be an intelligent investor through financial education

In day to day conversations, one can easily gauge that the MAJORITY of "investors" in the market are not intelligent.  An intelligent investor is as defined by Benjamin Graham in his book, The Intelligent Investor.

How can these investors acquire the financial education to guide them through the stock market investment minefields?  How can they acquire the investing philosophy and strategy to help them over many years (or decades) of their investing lifespan?  Above all to ensure that they do not lose their money in the stock market while seeking for a reasonable return.

Inevitably, this will involve acquiring a set of RELEVANT knowledge through their reading, their interactions with the other investors, their interactions with investment professionals and the market.  From personal experience, there is a huge core knowledge that has to be acquired.  This is probably too overwhelming for many potential investors. 

Therefore, though it is good to attend an hour's presentation on investment here and there, or even pay a small sum for a half day session on investment talk, this is not going to transform one into a intelligent investor.   At best, these are introductory sessions to highlight areas of investments where you may wish to explore further. How much knowledge can be acquired in a half day presentation that you cannot acquire from a good book?  At worst, you are "convinced" that you know investing when in fact the small amount of new knowledge you acquire is in fact very detrimental to your long term investing.

There is no substitute to hard work.  You would need to acquire the necessary core financial and investment knowledge.  You do not need very high power investment or financial knowledge.  However, you do need to acquire some simple knowledge in the relevant important fields to guide your investing.  Above all, you will also need to understand behavioural finance to guide your emotions.

By the way, with blogs springing up everywhere, you too have another avenue to observe investing by various individuals.  Learn their good and bad habits.  You will probably find some benefit reading this blog too. 

Good luck in your investing.

http://myinvestingnotes.blogspot.com/2008/12/investment-philosophy-strategy-and.html

http://myinvestingnotes.blogspot.com/2009/09/investing-for-beginners.html

http://myinvestingnotes.blogspot.com/2009/08/learn-to-invest-in-10-steps.html

http://myinvestingnotes.blogspot.com/2009/08/8-signs-of-doomed-stock.html