15 Characteristics of Highly Successful Investors

They always invest with a planned exit strategy

“Go to the mouse you foolish investor and learn. A mouse never entrusts its life to only one hole.” — Ajaero Tony Martins

Successful investors know that there are always two sides to an investment. They know that the future is unpredictable so they prepare in advance for it. Average investors try to predict the future of their investments; they count their chickens before they are hatched. Successful investors do the opposite; they prepare for the best while still preparing for the worst.


15 Characteristics of Highly Successful Investors

UGANDA’S BUSINESSES NEED TO STEP UP THEIR GAME

Uganda’s business community is facing serious existential issues with the opening up the East African common market.

When the common market is in full flow people, goods and services will traverse the region without barriers. At a very basic level it means – in terms of goods and services, that goods that of better quality and are better value for money will compete with the best and worst, of what we have to offer.

Consumers do not have nationalistic considerations in their spending habits, we will buy what has shown to be good value in the past regardless of where it comes from.

First let’s make a distinction between patriots and nationalists. Both have a great love of their countries the difference is, that a nationalist thinks his country is better than all others while a patriot wants the best for his/her country.

So consumers may be patriots but they are not nationalistic – believing that their countries make the best products in the world, unless of course where that is true.

And hence Uganda Inc’s dilemma. It is already happening with Kenyan commodities making a big push in our market and vying more than favourably for shelf space with our very own. The knee jerk reaction is to say, “Shut them out while we develop capacity to compete on even footing.”

But that time is past. The competition is here and it is not just beating on the door, it has knocked the door down and now heading for pride of place at the head of the table.

Faced with this challenge Ugandan business has to be come more efficient.

Last week world reknown speaker Larry Hochman was in town at the invitation of the British Council to talk to businessmen and leaders about success in their respective enterprises.

The Success of any enterprise Hochman says, will depend on how central customer service, courageous leadership and talent management to the management’s thinking.

The customer is king is now cliché, but like all cliches they tend to get only lip service.

“Customer relations is the single most important ingredient for success, without putting the customer at the heart of every enterprise it is hard to be successful,” he said.

This linked invariably with leadership, which is “Courageous to take the actions to make any enterprise ever more responsive to its clients”

Hochman questioned the relevance of customer relations departments, as if customer care is the responsibility of one department and not the whole enterprise.

“We are in the information age, what that means that it gives people choice, power and control, the necessity to keep promises to the customers will be clear to leaders because the customer will punish them for talk and no action and they can spread the word,” he said.

His opinion on talent management would sound even more radical for our business leaders, “Your goal: To be an attractor of talent. All the best people should be knocking at your door and if they are not you should wonder.”

And understandably so. The leader can have the best vision centered around obsessive customer relations up and down the enterprise, “But if you don’t have the people to deliver the vision it does not matter.”

We treat our human resource like they are dispensable but a useful measure of the happiness of our customers can be established by judging the happiness of our workers, because our staff can only look out for the clients interests if theirs are being catered for adequately. And here he was not talking about pay but the whole environment in which our workers operate in.

If our business can work on this they might have a fighting chance, especially since the focus on these three things will ensure that our businesses can develop a unique value proposition.

“Customer relationships are the unique value your business will develop, it takes days, weeks, years to building relationships based on trust, relationships which cannot be replicated by anybody … of course it does no t take as long to jeopardize,” Hochman said.

Our businessmen will need to step up their games if they are not only to survive but to thrive in an increasingly hostile environment.

They will have to look beyond physical infrastructure – buildings, plant and machinery, to spur them on to success, but to the “soft-soft” issues of customer relations, leadership and talent management.

pbusharizi@newvision.co.ug

5 Money Rules for Pessimists

When it comes to personal finances, pessimism gets a bad rap. “The one exception where pessimists might have a leg up over optimists is money management,” says Colorado Springs, Colorado financial planner and CBS MoneyWatch blogger Allan Roth. “They worry more, so they tend to save more.”

Pessimists are also more cautious. In studies that looked at optimists, pessimists, and gambling tendencies (a good parallel to the stock market), researchers found that pessimists tend to bet less and expect less when the gaming isn’t going their way, so they lose less. That’s right, pessimists, fret not (if you can help it): Seeing the glass half-empty might net you a fuller glass at the end of the day. That’s because pessimists have some characteristics on their side, such as caution, that can translate into more stable financial portfolios and larger retirement nest eggs. If you’re a pessimist by nature, the key is to harness your realism — while tempering the negativity. Sure, it’s good to keep in mind that black swans occur and stock markets can crash, but it’s counterproductive to assume that no risky investments will ever pay off. Here are five rules to help:
1. Get Control of Your Fear

There’s a basic principle called loss aversion that influences our financial decisions: the high you get from winning isn’t as powerful as the low you feel from losing. This phenomenon is exacerbated for pessimists. “When losses happen, pessimists are miserable, and when gains happen, they’re not as happy as they think they will be,” says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and author of The Upside of Irrationality. Pessimists should try to view risk as the cost of doing business, and remind themselves that it makes sense to take some risk. For example, consider all the probabilities when investing for retirement: The odds of the stock market going nowhere for 30 years are fairly low, while the odds of money markets lagging inflation over the next 30 years are fairly high.

2. Give Yourself Permission to Spend

“I have to tell my pessimist clients: You have permission to spend some of your money,” Roth says. “Even the ones with huge nest eggs are afraid they’ll wind up with nothing somehow.” There is a big difference between frugal living and withholding your spending to the point that your quality of life suffers. The huge nest egg when you’re 80 won’t wipe out the regret you feel for not taking those vacations you could have well afforded when you were 50. Set aside a cache of spending money — in a separate account even. Ignore that savings when it comes to calculating your future needs; that should help you get comfortable with the idea that you’ll be spending it.

3. Partner Up

“Having a financial companion to talk things over with can be really helpful,” says Moshe Milevsky, a finance professor at York University. Ideally, it’s someone who neither echoes your pessimism nor counters everything with optimism. Pessimists can really benefit from a neutral sounding board, whether it’s a spouse, friend, or financial planner.

4. Assess Your Insurance

“Pessimists tend to be over-insured, especially for life insurance,” Milevsky says. Those premiums can be wasted money if the value of your policy is out of line with your financial responsibilities. “Do a rational, analytic assessment of your insurance and what you’re spending in premiums,” he says. The point of life insurance is to provide your dependents with a replacement income stream if you should die. So buy enough insurance to cover their needs, nothing more.

The same is true for extended warranties, which tend to be expensive. They’re worth it sometimes — but not all of the time, especially since the chances of multiple items breaking at once is low. Channel your realism (not your negativity) to weigh the probabilities, and then self-insure by diverting the money you would otherwise have spent on warranties into a savings account instead.

5. Stop Watching Your Portfolio

“If you tend to only see the negative, don’t look too frequently at your investments because you will only be miserable,” Ariely says. Even more important, don’t be reactive. It goes back to loss aversion: Be careful of doing something spur of the moment (like pulling all of your money out of the stock market) because you want to avoid the misery you fear is coming. “It’s good to evaluate, but don’t evaluate based on emotion,” he says, especially if you’re in a doom and gloom mood. Instead, take the long view. If the market has just crashed, for example, ask yourself: a year or two after a market crash, is it usually higher or lower?

Life insurance as a savings account

Question: I'm 33, make about $150,000 a year and am starting from scratch to plan for retirement. A person close to me wants to sell me life insurance with a cash value feature as a way to save. Can you help me here? What do you think is my best option? --Carlos R., Houston, Texas

Answer: I'm not sure what "a person close" to you means. A relative? Friend? An acquaintance or co-worker? But whoever it is, the first thing I suggest you do is put some distance between you and that person, at least as far as your finances are concerned.

Life insurance as a savings account

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal." - Henry Ford

Stay away from people who belittle your ambitions...the really great, make you feel like you can become great ~ Mark Twain

You may be rich, but are you wealthy?

Many of us struggle because we are unable to differentiate between riches and wealth, we acquire liabilities in the belief that they are assets, we put our money into schemes and claim that we are investing, we participate in savings groups yet we call them investment groups, we read and hear opinions and take them as advice.

You may be rich, but are you wealthy?