Organizing Thoughts

I think it's good for us to take time to organize our thoughts once in a while, particularly useful before we make an decision to invest in a company, a bond, etc. Anyway, I've found writing these blog posts a good platform for me to articulate my thoughts on the companies and investment instruments and actually start to really analyze my decisions. So, for this post, I hope to be able to convince you that this is a good way to go for you before you make investments.

(Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/module-share-items-organization-68955/)

I'm not sure if any of you have actually come across this situation where someone has recommended you a share and started giving maybe a short 2 minute speech on it (or like me, writing a blog post on it) and at the end of it when you look the share, it seems pretty good and you start to repeat to yourself the key points of the person when deciding whether to invest or not. This happens to me, or at least I haven't taken action on any of this advice so far, but I get the feeling that I should invest in the company simply after the speech or just a brief read through its financial statements (which is useless since I'm already looking through tinted lenses).

So, for investing in shares in particular, I've found writing these blog posts, some of which can take me almost a few hours to write, on the different companies and finding information that may affect the company before I am able to come to my final conclusion on the companies. Usually looking at the medium- to long-term factors, instead of short-term factors which can change quickly, can lead to a fairly stable outlook on the company and then relating this outlook back to the price of the company and deciding if it is a good investment.

Really researching in depth into the company and then having to think about putting this research and thoughts into writing can really help. Publishing the information can further help this as other people are able to add in their thoughts on top of your thoughts and give you extra insights into the company which you may not have noticed. Even if you do not want to start your own financial blog, it would be good to at least show your thoughts to someone you trust or is close to you to see if the ideas you have penned down are reasonable evaluations and not just some illogical fallacy (which happens, sometimes reading my blog posts before posting them leads to potential posts being deleted).

This writing also allows you to spend a few days thinking before investing as you won't lose the thoughts that you had previously. In the long-term, you can also refer to these thoughts that you had previously. Like in the recent drop in share prices, if you think of selling the shares, you can look through the reasons you bought into the share in the first place and review them. If none of them changed or new ones added, then it would make very little sense to sell the shares simply because the share price has dropped, right? In my opinion, this helps keep you rooted to your original ideas when investing in the company and be less affected by the mood swings of Mr. Market.

Writing down your thoughts helps you to organize them and also to be able to refer back to them in the future whether to continue expanding on them or as a strong boulder to hold your actions down and keep to your original views.

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