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By Michael Sterling
The wheels of investing is an ever-running circle of time and money. Time is money. Yet to gain money, you need great timing. The secrets passed down from mentor to protege have never fallen short of these two worlds. The world’s best investor will tell you that in order to gain money in the market, you need to take risks.
Up Is Low, And Low Is Up
Being comfortable with your investments in the stock market rarely lead to high returns. The market goes up and down on a daily basis, and you’re never going to increase your wealth by playing safe. Warren Buffet said that in order to become rich, you need to be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.
Don’t follow the hype. One of the biggest secret most investors fail to understand is that when the market is low, it has no other direction to go but up, right? This is the best time take risks. When you invest all your money to a stock that is ever growing, it is eventually going to hit a climax and you’ll lose the timing in gaining real money.
Time & Money = Intuition & Intellect
If time were intuition and money were intellect, the merging is a definitive strategy to investing. Great timing doesn’t come from nothing, there is always homework that needs to happen before you make predictive decisions. This comes from your effort in studying each individual company on how they are in their ecosystem of things, not what the media or your buddies say.
If you were to go in for surgery, who would you rather have operate on you? Someone who has done hundreds of surgeries or someone who has watched a lot of medical documentaries? The logic is as ridiculous as it sounds, and is parallel to investmenting.
Don’t make stupid predictions based on a gut feeling you have, unless you personally, know nothing about the company you speak of.
Investigate Your Invested Companies
When a company is doing badly in the stock market, trust me. They don’t like it just as much as we do. So what they do is take a look at their business strategy in a more critical way. The companies you feel have great potential quite often turn around their strategies when they are on the brink of collapse. Such was the case for Best Buy (BBY).
Between 1997 and 1999, Best Buy saw an incredible change of course. Their share price rebounded from under $2 to just under $60. This was because the company as a whole began to be significantly centralized within all the stores, versus letting each location function on its own which was the typical trend in most electronic companies.
Better sales experience and inventory controls lead to a more efficient system to track and purchase inventory across all stores. Before 1997, Best Buy was suffering and until this change of strategy, they were close to collapsing. In just two years, they managed to grow fast enough to be the leading retail store in electronics, according to CNN Money.
Watch The Investors
Markets are 80% – 90% dependent on governmental regulations, and often many successful investors use such tactics to determine the future of a market. For example, in recent months the Federal Reserve has said that they will be raising the interest rate for bank loans, something that you would think the American people would be annoyed by.
However, in the few months after their announcement, banks saw a 9% rise in the stock market. Turns out, investors thought that banks would be reaping a lot more revenue due to the new measures. But remember the first point. What goes up, must come down. In this case, it was the investors that decided the rise in market, not the company.
Don’t underestimate the assumptions of other people. When their money goes into a company for whatever reason, this can be something you can also take advantage of. Know the minds of investors just as much as you know the company. Gain from their impulse investing.