Reading the Financial Pages for Dummies®

Chapter 4. Using the Pages to Your Advantage

In This Chapter

• Identifying your investment style

• Choosing between direct ownership or a nominee account

Before you can make the most of the financial information available to you, you have to establish a few simple points about the sort of person you are, and how much time and energy you're prepared to expend on the pursuit of financial nirvana. This chapter aims to help you achieve a perfect balance between making money and having a life.

Choosing Your Basic Strategy

I start this section by asking a few simple questions about your basic outlook on life, and on the investment world in particular. Your responses are important because they shape not just the way you use the information you get from the financial pages, but also the kind of information you go looking for in the first place.

Some people seem to be born with sunny dispositions, and some are the broody type. Some make friends easily and spend a lot of their time communicating busily with everyone around. Others are more private and self-sufficient, and achieve their best work when they're working alone on something too deep and complicated to be easily explained to other people.

That's fine. Life would be pretty tedious if everyone was the same. And, if you think about it, the financial markets would become pretty volatile if everyone was trying to achieve the same thing all the time. As soon as an opportunity opened up at the gates of Company A, people would all rush towards it ...