The most important thing for beginning investors is to figure out what type of investing strategies they are comfortable with and then embracing it whole heartedly. But how do you discover what works for you? Of course you read this blog. But let’s say you want something more. You can always look at the greats, the investing greats and try to pick up on skills they had that you can emulate or techniques that you understand and work for you. This will not be the same for everyone. I respond well to value investing. It made sense the first time I heard about. I got it. Momentum investing, I don’t get. It seems counter intuitive to me. I will not say that you can’t make money that way, but I know I can’t make money chasing the wave.  Maybe you can. But first you have to figure out if what works for you.

This is going to be the first in a series on Great Investors worth looking at. I am not going to go into detail about their lives. I mean really, who cares? If you do read a book about their life. There are plenty of books to read if you want more detail and most have written books of their own. I am going to start with Phil Fisher because I mentioned him a couple of posts back. And he is not in the news so, he may not be as well known as others are now. I am going to break it into two parts. I will mention what they said that has been important to me as an investor. You can explore them in more detail if they sound appealing to you.

What was he all about? He liked young growth stocks. Fisher focused on research, but in an unconventional way. He said was that you read as much as you can on a company. Journals, annual reports, online forums (o.k. maybe not the last bit). Then he thought you should talk to anyone who was knowledgeable about the company you were researching. Try to talk to management and employees, but also competitors and customers. This he called scuttlebutt and using this tool was vital to digging out the right information for making an informed decision on a company. He believed you should visit as many places related to the company as possible, not just its corporate headquarters. All of this to get information on the company you were interested in.

One of the most important things he said, at least to me was, “I don’t want a lot of good investments; I want a few outstanding ones.” I keep looking for grea

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