DIY investor
Andy Davis
Investor—know thyself
If you get sufficiently interested in investment to want to do it for yourself, you can end up knowing a bit about an awful lot of subjects. Stick at it long enough and you might even learn a decent amount about one of the most important: what kind of investor are you?
It has taken me a long time to realise how central this question is. There are plenty of investment styles, two of the major ones being “value” (buying unloved stocks you judge to be cheap and waiting for them to perk up), and “growth investing,” which means buying companies with rapidly- increasing revenues and, ideally, profits. How readily you take to either of these styles, or any other, depends a lot on your personality.