Читать книгу Taming the Lion - Richard Farleigh - Страница 26

If the papers and so-called experts are unreliable, how do you ever learn about markets? The answer is that you should start by trying to understand what’s happened in the past. I cannot stress this too strongly. A common mistake of all levels of investors is not doing enough homework. Most of my own time on markets has been investigating how prices have behaved in the past. You cannot hope to predict if you do not understand.

I am not suggesting an enormous amount of research. The effort should be in thinking about how prices have reacted to big picture influences in the past few market cycles. This does not require extensive number crunching or time in the library.

Consider the dollar-euro rate. Before I would ever dare to have a view, I would have to understand where it’s been and why. In the last few years, the euro has had a whopping range in value of $0.85 to $1.35. The reasons behind the moves include budget deficits, trade balances, interest rates, economic growth and politics. But these are big picture influences - we don’t need to delve into anything too obscure. I will give you more help later with some useful ways to track these things.