Think Like the Great Investors: Make Better Decisions and Raise Your Investing to a New Level

Chapter 14

I remember it all too well (availability revisited)

Life presents us with many situations in which we are called upon to make a decision, often without allowing us the luxury of having full information. This is known as decision making under conditions of uncertainty. Investing is a very good example for two general reasons:

• The future is always unknowable. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of people who profess to be able to forecast the future, sometimes based on projections of the past and at other times using arcane methods with no proven basis for reliability. Even well-regarded experts may be of little help in divining the future. For example, how many of them warned of the impending global financial crisis in 2007?

• There may be information available, but finding and assessing it is both time consuming and difficult for typical private investors, who lack education in investing and who are time poor.

What this means is that we should all seek to extend and improve our investment knowledge and our skills at finding and assessing information. This is likely to be an unending, life-long task, which can be very rewarding in both money and satisfaction, but a great deal of time and effort is required. In effect, we need to train ourselves in a new profession that may be quite different to what we have already experienced in secondary- and tertiary-level education ...