Good Morning Green Panda Friends. This week we will post the last two topics in our “Investing: The Ins and Outs of Dividends” series. Among other topics during this dividend investing series we have discussed the benefits of dividend investing, why you should consider investing in dividends, if dividends are better than stocks as well as when we should not consider dividend investing. Today we are sticking with our investment topic. Today we are discussing very common rookie investment mistakes and how to avoid them when we are starting to invest. It is very common for rookies to make mistakes whenever we are starting something new, so Green Panda is here to help you try and avoid making some rookie investment mistakes. However, these are only guidelines because no matter how much material we read about investing, the only tried and tested way to learn is by trial and error. It’s definitely ok to make mistakes in anything in life, whether it is investing or something else, as long as we learn from our mistakes.
Don’t Assume You Know It All
It’s very common for rookies to learn about something new and assume that we know everything about the topic, unfortunately this is not true. Even financial professionals who have many years of investment experience do not know everything about personal finance, about the market, and about global economics. It is great to learn about new topics and subjects, but it’s impossible to know every single thing about every single topic.
Know a Little Bit About Everything, But Focus on One Topic
It’s ok not to know every detail about every single type of investment. Being an investor doesn’t mean that we are a financial guru. As a Financial Services Professional I have a general working knowledge of all things related to personal finance even though my area of specialty is investment and retirement planning. Even though my work is focused around investment and retirement planning I do not know absolutely everything about all investment options and taxation rules. I keep up to date with market trends and I have a general knowledge of all types of investment options so that I can give good financial advice to my clients, but I do not concentrate on investment options that I do not directly work with on a daily basis such as derivatives and options investing.
Understand that Knowledge Comes With Experience
As a rookie investor there is only so much information that we can take away from our formal education and there is only so much knowledge that we can learn from studying the market movements and from reading about our different types of investment options. True knowledge comes with experience whether it is gained from work experience or it is acquired by learning from our own mistakes. We only get better with age and our knowledge only gets better with experience.
If you like this post be sure to check out all of the previous posts in our “Investing: The Ins and Outs of Dividends” series.
Tahnya is 30 years old and lives in Montreal Quebec. She graduated in 2005 from Concordia University, and she currently works for a major International Financial Institution. She recently launched http://www.mediamadam.ca/. You can follow her on Twitter @TahnyaP.