How to become a good investor

A few times I get a PM from people who want to know to become a good investor. This is my standard answer:

You're probably not going to like my answer, but... here we go, these are the steps that I suggest you take if you want to invest, I wrote them in order:

1. Ask yourself if you're sure you want to invest and not trade or speculate or gamble with stocks. An investor invests, meaning s/he buys securities and hold them for the long term; with a time horizon of over 5 years, and with the scope to preserve the capital and grow it. It's not about making a living from the stock market, it's not about short term trades, it's not about making decisions solely by looking at charts (Technical analysis).

2. Are you a critical thinker? If yes, continue expanding your critical thinking skill, otherwise r/criticalthinking is a good start

3. Are your personal finances in order? r/personalfinance

4. Do you have capital to invest? Look back at what I said at #1, investing is about preserving capital and grow it. Investors invest money that they already have; it's not about creating something out of nothing

5. Take some Open Course Ware classes on business, investing, and portfolio management, coursera.com is a good source for that

This will take time, a lot of time, and this is why (I wrote about this before). When we buy a stock (or sell) on the other side there's someone else who sells that stock (or buy); the stock market only facilitates the transaction.

Look at Wall Street. They hire the top MBA/PhDs from the top schools, so chances are that for each trade there's a top MBA or PhD from a top school, to be a successful investor you need to outsmart them, that's your competition.

A 5 minutes read or 1 book won't cut it, it's not a IF this THAN that type of process.

Having said that, there's something you can do right now:

• if you have consumer debt, pay it off, and discipline yourself to live within your means. Paying off consumer debt is the best investment.

• if you don't have income, or it's not enough, develop your career, an investment in yourself is - again - the best investment you can do; that includes formal education as well as informal; and getting an education in Personal Finance (#3 above), and investing. And critical thinking is the overall skill, without critical thinking nothing good happens.

• if you have some money saved and you have no debt and you wont' need them for 5 years or so, you can start investing it by buying the S&P500, you can do so via Vanguard Mutual Funds or ETF like SPY. I won't give you the details on how to do that since you either know it already or.... searching on how to go about it will be part of the learning process.

You asked me for my opinion, I gave you my opinion; if you wanted a 1 book or 1 articles, I don't have it for you because I don't think it's feasible.

The subs r/personalfinance r/stocks and r/investing have good info in their sidebar and sticky posts, you can start there for some intro stuff.