Photo Credit: t m Seven sisters sitting on the hill

1) I started in this game as an amateur, and built up my skills gradually, reading widely.  My academic studies ended at age 25, and it was after that that I began learning the practical knowledge.  Though I had investment-related jobs, I never held a position in investing, until I was 38, and I never wrote on investing for the public in any significant way until I was 42, when Cramer invited me to write for RealMoney.  I’m now 55, and I think I am still growing in my knowledge of investing.

I write this to simply say that you don’t have to take a traditional path into the investment business.  I am grateful that I want through the circuitous path through the insurance industry, because it deepened my perspective on investing.  All of the asset-liability modeling, where I often tried to challenge existing paradigms, helped me to understand why often the conventional wisdom is true.  Where it is not true, there is usually an anomaly to profit from.

The other reason that I write this, is that it is possible to get significant knowledge as an amateur, and on a book basis, as good as many professionals. You won’t get the respect from professionals until you are a professional, but who cares?  You can do better for yourself in investing.  Just don’t get arrogant and forget to put risk control first.

2) After all of the political fights are over, OPEC nations will once again agree that they will cut production as a group.  Remember, much of OPEC has a low cost of production, and so when production decreases in a coordinated way, profits will rise for almost all OPEC nations.

In the long run, economics triumphs over politics.  The challenge comes in the short-run from trying to figure out who cuts how much from what baseline. Even after that, discipline takes a while to achieve, because the incentive to cheat is high.