As an analyst, or portfolio manager, my daily job is to attend company management meeting (now in COVID 19 era conference call), analyse company, write report, make recommendation to investment team, and invest within the framework set by my company and the fund mandate. There are tons of emails sent by broker everyday on corporate news update and research reports.
All these seems to give professional fund manager an edge over retail investor not in the fund management industry. But things start to change in recent years. Various internet/broker platforms for retail investor are gaining popularity. Due to huge number of retail investors and followers in those platforms, the platforms are able to attract talent from investment industry to give talk/seminar regularly, distribute broker research reports, and organise meeting with company management directly. The information flow in those retail internet platform is not second to professional investment industry. So what more advantage does the investment professional has?
In this internet era, information become abundance. Hence, in order to be successful in investing, having only first hand information is not enough. We need to realised that each of us only has 24 hours a day, and the world has millions of businesses and business decisions are being made all the time. There will always be people know something faster than us and react faster than us in the stock market. In short, we won't win by having first hand information.
We only can win by developing insight. Connecting dots from various information and put it together. Everybody will interpret information differently. We see things differently. Just like in school, we learn the same thing but end up someone else always get No.1 in the class. But we don't have to be No.1 in the stock market. The market is big enough for every prepared investor to make money.
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