Already ready to get started, head straight to CityFALCON for Newbies.

If you’re going to start a hobby, you’re going to bring background knowledge you’ve learned throughout your life to that hobby. If you want to learn how to play guitar, you have a life long of music listening experience, so you probably already know what kind of music you want to play. And the other hobbies you’ve picked up over the years have taught you perseverance, so you won’t give up.

For some inexplicable reason, people think this way about everything except investing. For many people investing is a world of numbers and decimal points, and infinitesimal minutia that only the people who invest for a living can take the time to understand. But this is not the case. It’s true that there are bankers who game the system, and anybody investing needs to have that awareness. Being naive of the system that can really help does no good, but almost everybody is immersed in a world where they contain specialty knowledge. That knowledge can give them a leg up over the most illustrious hedge fund manager.

Invest in What You Know

Investing in an industry that you are a part of or have deep experience in is like bringing existing knowledge to a new hobby. Investing can be intimidating, especially to the totally uninitiated, but the expertise from the day-to-day of an industry, plus a means to keep an eye on the financial markets, can make a truly effective investor.
Typically the average worker will certainly have more knowledge of their sector or industry than someone investing in it from a bank in New York. That’s a disadvantage for the Wall Street types, but the advantage Jordan Belfort and his much more mild mannered real-life counterparts is access to information.

In the digitized world, the problem was compounded for decades, while those who could afford access to information got it instantly. Those wire services cost thousands of dollars a month, and essentially left a huge part of the market, and all that brainpower, left behind.

How to Break into Investing

But the problem is inverting. There are several services including ours taking that same underused brainpower and abandoned people in the market and giving them the same access to information as anyone else. Based on feedback from people who have never invested before, we have built a simple onboarding wizard to get newbies started here.

It’s impossible to say exactly what makes an investor successful, but it’s certain that all those investors have auspicious traits they share. Good investors take time to research and immerse themselves as much as possible in a sector before they invest, they have steeped themselves in the market for as long as possible, continually get up to the minute updates, and they’re patient.

It may not feel like it, but people who are new to investing already have two of those four traits covered. There are services online that provide constant, relevant information, and the sector you’ve immersed yourself in can often be the one you’ve worked in for most of your career. Every day is at work gives you a special perspective and knowledge of the industry you work in.

Don’t be Afraid to get Help

As for the traits successful investors share that others often don’t, they can be gained with some assistance and time. Immersing yourself in the financial markets is an absolutely essential part, but there are many books and sources all over the internet to help. There are also many meetings and gatherings in the real world that can help you achieve your goal of becoming an investor.

For example in London, there’s the London Value Investing Club that has bimonthly meetings for investors of all skill levels who want to learn more. We’ve only been doing this for a short while, but we already have beginners sitting in on the advanced classes.

People get a lot out of these meetings, which is great, and why we’re glad to put them on. But as they move forward, the most surprising thing for us as the organizers and instructors is how often people with virtually no investment background shock us with truly insightful ideas and perspectives we would never be able to think just by ourselves.

Those who surprise us lack the financial background and savvy we have, but they have many lifetimes worth of experience in their industries over us. They’re on their way to being incredibly diligent investors, and anyone can take the same steps.