Peter Darland on the traits of an outstanding investor

This message is 'love it or leave it,' but how can a young person with no experience of investing know in advance how much he will like it?  Here are some of the qualities which an outstanding practitioner of the art of investment is likely to have:

• an insatiable curiosity as to everthing that is going on in the world.
• a capacity to assess people, because businesses are mainly about the people who run them; a sense for psychology will be useful too.
• an awareness of the constant need to question conventional wisdom and a healthy scepticism about what he hears from company spokesmen, stockbrokers and research analysts.
• the ability to accept losses and move on, combined with the patience to stay with winning investments indefinitely.
• a calm temperament - investment can be humbling and stressful.
• common sense.
• intuition.
• a sense of humour - it will be necessary for survival.
• an acquisitive instinct - materialistic as it may sound, the desire to make money for oneself through investing is essential.

If a young person feels he has most of these qualities in good measure, he should try investment management.  He will be endlessly absorbed by it, he will enjoy it and he may even make some money.

~ Peter Stormonth Darling, City Cinderella: The Life and Times of Mercury Asset Management (2000)

(Thanks to Chris Mayer for tweeting this page.)