Invest Insight

The Time I referring to here is the amount of time on hand, not the period of time commonly spoken of in investing.

What I am trying to get at here is that in order to be successful in investing, one not only need to invest money but also invest time as well.

Regardless of the form of investment - whether stocks, shares, bond, unit trust, options, futures, commodities and what have you, time is required to understand the basics and learn the details.

There is no shortcut to investing. So what happen when you have limited time?

My experience taught me 3 things.

• Educate yourself
• Get to know yourself
• Set aside time

Educate yourself

It is worthwhile to remember that education is the best investment and pays the best dividend.

So the first thing is to learn, as much as possible, as quickly as possible. But how do you know what to learn? There is such a vest body of knowledge, where do you start?

This lead us to the next point.

Get to know yourself

Your investing activities has to fit your personal profile. Do you work in the day? How much money do you have to invest? What is your objective? What is your risk profile?

Sounds very much like a financial analysis. Well it is. Knowing yourself is a basis for financial planning as well as the first step to investing.

Set aside time

This leads us back to the topic of Time. Taking into consideration your other commitments, how much time can you set aside?

It is easy in our daily busyness to steal time from the long term for our short term needs.

Investing is generally long term and the effect may not be immediate. If time is not set aside, it is likely that time could be “stolen away” for immediate gratification. Like from reading an investment book to watching a movie.

Take care of the time to invest and over time your investment will take care of you.