II Today

A ringside view of global financial markets

About This Blog

For my own professional purposes I have long made a practice of tracking the views of a small minority of leading professional investors whose opinions  or exceptional achievements I have come to respect during 30 years of following the financial markets. In my experience monitoring and analysing the views of the best professionals is far more rewarding and helpful in forming an effective investment strategy than analysing unreliable economic data or systematically imprecise analyst forecasts.

Realising that this practice could also be useful for others inspired me to start not just this blog, but also a subscription-only newsletter, to be published in due course  by my publishing venture Independent Investor. The newsletter will contain regular exclusive Q and As with a panel of  some 30 top market practitioners, updated and emailed to readers as they are written. Independent Investor also publishes a free weekly market report, written by one of the UK’s top  professional investment managers.

The purpose of this blog is slightly different. In it I post short comments on interesting pieces of news, commentary or research that have caught my eye.  My aim is to pick out items that may have more than transitory  interest or significance.  Most investors in my experience need a filter to bring the mass of material down to manageable proportions.

You can find out more about the newsletter, my books  and about other investment activities from the main Independent Investor website. I welcome comments from readers, although I am not unfortunately in a position to reply to them all. These are fascinating times in the markets – times of great opportunity as well as danger, in my view.  I hope that you will find the blog helpful.

Written by Jonathan Davis

August 23, 2010 at 10:55 AM