Investing for the Long Term

Conclusions and Future

Developing a sound investment process is a personal challenge. My approach has been to look to the best investors in the world, the true masters. I have chosen and studied them with great care; reading and listening to them and trying to glean all I can from them. This is how I have gone about developing my own approach, which is the great ‘secret’. This approach has been refined by the experience of day-to-day life, which has helped it to take shape. This is how you develop firm and coherent beliefs, which enable you to be courageous and turn your back on the herd; being patient and accepting uncertainty and, ultimately, keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs.

Armed with an appropriate intellectual framework and having developed the necessary personality traits for a sound investment process, we can attain our goal of preserving and increasing the purchasing power of our savings.

The Austrian School of Economics provides us with such an intellectual framework, offering an accurate description of reality which provides us with a solid foundation for analysing economic developments. It's an economic analysis that won't predict a country's economic growth or consumer behaviour, but will give us a basis for distinguishing the implications of market interventions and prepare us for dealing with them.

The markets work reasonably well since they represent no more than exchanges between individuals acting freely. Some market participant or another ...