The majority of us will look at the Financial Markets as a complex set of fluctuating random numbers, much like bingo balls in a hopper. A game of chance which requires slivers of luck for it to go our way.
To most it’s similar to going down to the racetrack and betting on a random horse, but the betting is placed in a cubicle by a person in a business suit.
Most of us will decide that we don’t have the time, experience, or the education to truly understand the intricacies of the financial markets. We constantly hear on the various news channels that the S&P 500 swung up or down on a particular day, and then just shrug and say, so what?
All of this high finance appears strictly and completely disconnected from what we experience on a daily basis, so we invest in the safety of our low interest accounts, or our sheltered retirement funds, and leave the details up to the so-call professionals of finance.
So What About Those Financial Investment Gurus
So who are those self proclaimed investment gurus who are constantly seeking to be heard as they build up their reputations squawking out financial advice.
They’re seeking for individuals to believe in them, their advice. There are also numerous blogs, magazines, newspapers, newsletter and journals which are filled with their financial advice.
According to the true investment advisers and critics however, the word is to be careful, tread carefully forward and take everything with a grain of salt. It can become a dangerous proposition to take their general financial information and acting on them at face value. This without bothering to first taking the effort to see if it even applies to your particular financial situation.
Although the majority of these financial advisers are reasonably informed about how the stock or the bond market will likely perform, or can reasonably predict the price of gold, how really informed are they regarding your personal and particular needs.
What they do is provide generic advice to capture crowd interest, information which at times which can be useful but is rather too general. As accurate as some of them are providing their information, you’re the only one that can determine if it even applies to your financial portfolio or not.
Listening To Financial Investors
The biggest problem is deciding which of these financial gurus actually have their fingers on the pulse of the markets. Even if there is information which is available regarding their track records, there’s no way to tell if their next great prediction or tip is going to be right.
What may be even worse is that some more than likely will be swayed towards believing in them, since they’re expressing what we may suspect is true. What they’re doing is merely feeding and then agreeing with what we think.
So as a result, their power to influence us comes not from the fact that they’re experts, but rather from how they amplify and emulate our thoughts or our previously formed convictions and fears.
What it essentially comes down to is a form of superstition. It’s not that much different from reading the horoscopes which we find in our daily papers. Horoscopes can also predict and then reaffirm, or feed on our fears and our future, by telling us what to do and believe on that particular day.
What these guides do is get us thinking and then prepare us for potential scenarios for the day ahead. They’re capable of provoking a reflective process, but they’re not and shouldn’t be trusted as anything that’s reliable.
Getting Various Opinions
There’s really no substitute for being mindful or having informative conversations with others. What this does is it cements you to become aware of what your exact situation is, or how it may be different from others.
It also adds to the inventory of ideas regarding any potential trends, so then you’ll have a variety of stored perspectives. This then should leave you with your own valid and reasonable decision to make.
What all this is doing is making us uncertain and anxious, but the fact is that what we’re doing is taking and then making our best calculated risks. What the anxiety signifies is that we may be in new uncharted territory, making us uncertain, which is always near the edge of the unknown.