Jubilee Prosperity

Despite carefully looking for bargains with income in business and supermarkets, it is more easy, human and typical to buy high and sell low when we respond to our emotions and herd instinct.

Being a brilliant novelist, consummate CEO, fabulous entertainer, good doctor, heir or heiress, Nobel Prize winner, patented inventor with staggering royalties, rich lawyer or rocket scientist does not guarantee success in the markets.

Just ask a banker to loan you money to invest, speculate or trade sometime.

We feel less anxiety, less cognitive dissonance, less stress when we go with the crowd.

When I trained as a School Psychologist, a little girl told me her mother’s best advice was to stay with the crowd.

This does not work as well with investing.

Very few of us have the emotional discipline to buy low while most are selling, or sell high when most are buying.

It just goes against human nature.

Maybe one in a billion can do this effectively.

There are six billion people on this earth, versus Warren Buffett, Jim Roger and George Soros who have distinguished themselves with uncommon returns.

And they make mistakes, something out of date headlines on their moves do not always announce to the casual reader or viewer.

How do what they do so well to rise above all the noise and angst?

My successful investor grandfather told me as a young boy successful investing requires sangfroid.

When I asked him what that meant, he said cold blood and left it at that.

For a long time I was not sure that was good.

It took decades to learn in the markets firsthand what he meant.

Grandpop and my dad bought natural resource companies when nobody wanted them and sold them when everybody wanted them. They did all right.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Prosperity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.