I am a software engineer for hire. It has been my trade since my first gig ca. 1985, and as a full-time employee and as a consultant during and since my C.S. degree. This profession requires continuous and independent learning to keep up with the fresh college graduates.
I am a financial engineer of necessity, should I hope to ever become financially independent. I apply the same learning approach to economic and financial matters that I use to keep up my employment-related knowledge and skills.
I read everything. Company reports, Fed publications, financial times, scientific journals, economic papers, the wsj, mother earth news, and much more covering agriculture, automotive, aviation, botany, ...More chemistry, construction, economics, electronics, firearms, geology, hvac, history, irrigation, law, medicine, physics, plumbing, wiring, yeast, and a bunch more are on the bookshelf and nightstand just behind my right shoulder. My short-term goal is to know about everything, with more about what I need or want to learn at present. My long-term goal is to know everything about everything.
While history may not repeat exactly the same, I believe it does rhyme. Thus the importance of Cicero's, "Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child."
History has led me to invest in companies with a history of growing their dividend. Capital gains are only useful once you turn them into cash flow. History shows you get better results if you skip the conversion. So I invest for cash flow, not for capital gains.
Thru my study of science, history, economics and sociology, I've found the Austrian school of economics to have the most valid explanations of why it happened, how it happened, and what will happen. Because of that I know that silver and gold are money, and so part of my portfolio has long been in Ag and Au for diversification, and part for insurance against history rhyming as pointed out by Mises:
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of the voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved. --Ludwig von Mises
I don't see any sign of "the voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion."
For those who think everyone but them thinks like lemmings: I do not watch fox news or cnn or msnbc or TV. I listen to the radio 0.75-1.0 hours per day while I commute. Over 90% of that time the station tuned is rock -- alternative, classic, hard, ... but sometimes country. Less than 10% of the time is split between country and a local ABC affiliate for local news and traffic. I'll sometimes listen to time-shifted recordings of financial-related talk shows while working. For entertainment/variety sometimes while working and while I fall asleep I listen to time-shifted recordings of Coast to Coast AM which have the ads removed, typically 4-6 weeks after they air. ("time-shifted" so I can skip the annoying segments be they callers or guests.) I also like to watch the children or the cows or the cat or the birds or the deer or the fox. (The chickens are gone. Gave the last two away as the fox was getting far too bold.)
I am a financial engineer of necessity, should I hope to ever become financially independent. I apply the same learning approach to economic and financial matters that I use to keep up my employment-related knowledge and skills.
I read everything. Company reports, Fed publications, financial times, scientific journals, economic papers, the wsj, mother earth news, and much more covering agriculture, automotive, aviation, botany, ...More