There are a lot of ways to invest, and a lot of thoughts and opinions on good strategies and procedures to make good investments. My opinions on what make good investments are simple.  The best strategies aren’t particularly exciting.  It’s a long-term process where you want to enjoy the benefit of compounding and long-term growth.  Good investing is not simple; there are all kinds of people who want to tell you that it’s easy and make it seem like you don’t need a clear and thorough process, but quite frankly those people are wrong.  Good investing requires a lot of thought, and not just quick decisions based on little considerations.

To perform well in the investing world, you must have different views than the consensus. The idea that “if you do whatever everyone else does, you get the same results” applies in the investing world more than anywhere else. If everyone expects that a company or sector is going to do extremely well and it does, you get the exact same result as they do by investing there. To outperform them, you must be willing to have differing views, act upon those views and be right.  That’s far from easy, which tells you all you need to know about the groups putting forward how simple it is to invest effectively.

Above all, good investing is about a solid and thorough investing process. While it’s true that investing is as much an art as it is a science, you need to understand the fundamentals and be able to apply those correctly.