“Do it yourself” – a phrase that excites some and terrifies others, no matter what the endeavor. If it involves home repairs, remodeling, cooking, auto repairs, child care, or any other of the myriad of tasks we each face on a daily basis, we each have to decide what we are going to do ourselves and what we will “outsource” to someone else.
Most of us have faced a situation where we have to deal with something important, but we don’t have the time, knowledge, expertise, patience or desire to deal with the problem ourselves. We often turn to someone, an “expert,” or “professional” to solve our problem. Having your car fixed is a great example. Many of us are unwilling and/or unable to deal with most car problems – especially with the complexity of new cars. We trust our huge investment and our freedom to someone who should be worthy of our trust and capable of fixing the car. We might ask what the problem is, what his or her plan is to deal with the problem or for his or her opinion. We often hear back a fairly long, and condescendingly delivered, speech full of technical terms and jargon that we don’t really understand. Out of fear, we often nod knowingly, act reassured, sign the work order and walk off, hoping that we’ll get our car back on time and without being overcharged.
Many times, we approach investing the same way. Whether you are a beginning investor, have accumulated some capital or have accumulated a great deal of money, the complexity of the financial world and alternatives offered are mind boggling. A google search for investment advice returns (in Google’s words) about 127,000,000 hits – that’s cognitive overload!
Our goal at thediyinvestor.com is to help sort through the noise and provide a basis for any investor, at any stage of his or her life, to be more confident of their choices, more informed, and most importantly, to share some ideas that can lead to being a successful investor.
Successful investing is about becoming informed, capable and responsible for your own fate, whether you solicit professional investment help or not. It’s not about politics, the economy, weather, or evening corporate earnings and governance. It’s not just about choosing the best fund manager, analyst, broker, financial planner or any other intermediary or finding the best website. It is about your own personal powers of observation and how you harness your talents and find the right mix of people and information that make you comfortable with your financial present and future.
That’s what we’re about – we’ve put together a team of people to help you sort through all the CNBC, Fox News, CBS Marketwatch multimedia noise. We look at websites, talk to professionals, do our own “quant” research, read macro predictions, follow trends and help boil it down to simple, elegant nuggets of information.
So whether you are interested in a true “do it yourself” investment future, or if you just want a better, unbiased, non jargon based view of what your financial professional tells you, we’re here to help.
The following are a few of the topics that will be covered here on the site:
- Investment Basics
- Diversification
- Risk
- Strategies
- Tactics
