Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Why I am starting this Blog.


First, I would like to welcome everyone -maybe rather anyone...- to my new blog.

I hope, that you will find it interesting, knowledgeable and at the very least readable. I have to confess that English is not my first language, so if you find any grammatical mistakes please bear with me.

Now before I introduce myself to any readers here, let me say that I would like to keep my anonymity & not bring my personal life in here. Haven't gotten anything to hide, I just choose to separate between my personal life & any business that I do.

I am in my 20's, married, got three little girls, and I live in suburban NY. I made some money in real estate in the boom years, but I haven't chosen any particular career yet. So, there I was thinking about a career path to enable me to support my family. And it just came to me; why not go to the source. If the whole worlds finances are dependent in some way to the happenings on Wall Street, and whoever succeeded there is mighty rich. Then it’s as Willie Sutton the bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, 'because that's where the money is'.

Now I have been reading a lot on the history of Wall Street, its gainers & losers. And it seems that the longest history of success belongs to the value investors. And that is even without mentioning Buffet. So if I decide to go to Wall Street, then of course I got to go with the biggest winners. So I decided to try and emulate the success of the value investor, and try to become one myself.

Once I came to this conclusion, I realized that in order for me to achieve my goal, there is a lot of knowledge that I need to pick up on. How to analyze companies, how to use information gathered in the analysis towards the coveted "value" investment. So I decided to start reading the famous books on value investing. I started by buying "The Intelligent Investor", and decided to start reading it. But then I saw that without a structured plan towards my education in value investing, I would never get to pull myself together to get it done. One day it will be laziness due to other activities which would appeal more, and the other day it will be plain laziness. And the days and months and years and decades will pass, and I still wouldn't get there.

After coming to the resolution that only a structured plan will take me to my desired goal. I sat down and tried to see how I can come up with a plan, and then how I can make sure to adhere to it. I realized that even after i come up with a plan, if I don't ensure my adherence to it, then the plan isn't worth anything. And that's where the blog idea came into my head.

I thought that if I would have a Blog, where I would blog about my path and about what it has taught me. Then the enjoyment & excitement by having other participants in my journey, would give me the drive to stride towards my desired goal.

So here I am, with this newly minted blog. I hope to post daily, and I would greatly appreciate any feedback.

I really wanted to write down my plan here too, but its getting late here. I might still post it today, otherwise I hope to post it tomorrow morning.

7 comments:

ECA said...

Good morning,

Glad you found out blog, I hope it will be helpful for you. More information about value investing can be found here: http://www.cabot.net/Publications/BGV.aspx?source=wi01

Enjoy and best of luck!

-Elyse
www.iconoclast-investor.com

Student Investor said...

Elyse,

Thanks for the encouragement!

As you can see, I just posted my blueprint. Phase 1 is establishing a curriculum.

Any good ideas which books to read?

Also, do you know of any active value investing blogs?

Anonymous said...

I recommend that you take a look at Contrarian Investors Journal. It covers more than just value investing.

johnnyvento said...

we welcome you into the Dark Side/Green on the Screen community, but you should be aware that Muddy's style (to which people like myself are entirely dedicated) does not involve value investing in any way. These methods involve day trading stocks based on technical and statistical analysis... pretty opposite of what you are trying to learn.

Come into the chat anyway, and see if you won't consider this to be a superior method (or at least a complementary one) to the one you are considering.

Closet Daytrader said...

Best Wishes to you!

Anonymous said...

Read "Security Analysis" and "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham. They are the Bibles for value investing!

Student Investor said...

Jim,

Thanks for the referral; I added it to my favorites.
Leaving the labels aside, contrarian investing is deep-value investing.

Johnnyvento,

I already tried day trading with technical and statistical analysis. It was too adrenaline building...

But I still follow it a lot, and always consider it as a complimentary method of earning some lovely money.

Closet Daytrader,

Thank you!

If I succeed, what’s your commission on getting your lotto-winning-friend to invest with me?
JK

Elyse,

Thanks, I already posted my choice of books, and these are there.