Respect for the intelligence of individual investors
Investment articles and books for individual investors often try to dumb it down. Attempts to reach a broad audience with shallow material can be very unsatisfying for those who seek a genuine and durable understanding.
The Skilled Investor has a different approach. It provides summary information about the key findings of investment science that intelligent readers will appreciate.
Many individual investors clearly understand their personal responsibility for their own financial and investment success or failure. While individuals may engage financial advisers, they ultimately are responsible, because they must live with the results of the decisions that they make directly or that they delegate to others.
Education on scientific investment and financial decision-making is extremely important. Delegating financial decisions largely on faith and hope without adequate personal knowledge, attention, and control can be very risky to your family’s welfare. The only practical solution for you is to increase your personal investment knowledge and skills.
The Skilled Investor empowers individuals and allows them to decide for themselves whether a particular financial or investment concept is fact or fiction – useful or not. It summarizes insights from the published research of financial academics, economists, and investment professionals. By reviewing these summaries, you can improve your decision-making skills. (See: The author's motivation and the evolution of his investment education efforts)
Individual investors taking control of their investment destinies want solid evidence. They do not want to spend their lives trying on one strategy or fad after another just to be repeatedly disappointed. Instead, they want to be convinced about the right strategies for the long run. This is particularly true when they must decide among a very large number of alternate, conflicting, plausible, and potentially confusing investment strategies advocated by a variety of practitioners with a wide range of knowledge, competence, and motivations. (See: How can individual investors trust, when so much information about investing is rubbish?)
Individual investors are smart, and they strive to control their business and employment affairs. They want a straightforward way to take charge of their investment decisions, as well. Like good business decision-makers, they want investment theories to be supported by facts.
The Skilled Investor does this for you. Logical and coherent strategic investment strategies from the scientific investment literature are woven throughout The Skilled Investor. Evidence is presented in concise articles with links to related articles. Articles are written so that a reader will understand the main points without having to wade through economic equations or statistical jargon. Some articles in The Skilled Investor are a breezy read, while others will require more concentration.
The good news is that optimal, scientifically based investment strategies can be straightforward. Investment research studies are remarkably consistent on their main points regarding what tends to work and what tends not to work in investing. If you read enough articles in The Skilled Investor, clarity about what to do should fall in place for you. No single article in The Skilled Investor is so vital that missing or skipping it will cause the whole fabric of these strategies to fall apart for you.
Finally, the goal of The Skilled Investor is straightforward and single-minded. The author wants readers to understand and adopt efficient and optimal investment strategies and tactics. The objective is to help individual investors and their families ensure that they will have sufficient financial resources to meet their needs throughout their lives.
Originally, I set out to convince myself about how I should invest optimally. Personally, I achieved my objective. Yet, I found the scientific investment literature to be sufficiently rich and interesting for me to I keep reading, thinking about, and summarizing it for your benefit. I hope that The Skilled Investor will help you to increase your personal financial and investment knowledge, improve your risk-adjusted investment performance, better control investment costs and taxation, and more efficiently manage your time.
Larry Russell, Editor and Publisher
See also:
What is The Skilled Investor and who will find it useful?
How does The Skilled Investor find and summarize scientific investment information?