Making investment mistakes

A piece of advice that has stuck with me over the years has been “In gaining an education in the stock market, you cannot set either the timing or the cost”. Most articles produced by fund managers focus on great stock picking successes, highlighting brave and courageous decisions made by the fund manager in the face of naysayers and critics. Obviously, this is done with the motive of encouraging clients to invest in funds managed by an individual with superior intellect and investment instincts than their peers. These articles are always quite easy to write as they conjure up pleasant memories of investing triumphs. However, I am firmly of the opinion that successes don’t build investing skills, but rather, building future outperformance requires the accumulation of knowledge learned from painful experiences. In this week’s piece, I am going to look at mistakes that I have made over the past two decades of being a professional fund manager.