[DcifrThs]

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What is your personal approach to understanding what is going on with the market well enough to trade profitably? Is it reading the Economist and WSJ, talking with informed friends, or some other process?

Thanks for your help.

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it involves reading and thinking. more thinking and then researching. then talking to people smarter and more experienced than me. the latter is part of the reason why i posted this thread. i'd like to get some tough questions from smart people and really have to try to dig into them.

reading WSJ is more of data collection and keeping up with the news. reading the FT is more about getting into analysis and seeing what is going on in the world. and reading the economist is the absolute best because it gives great articles about finance & global political & economic factors that make you think and relate it all together.

you'll never know everything, or even close. taking it a piece at a time and seeing what happens when you add the next piece both in expectation and then checking with data is the way to learn imo.

overall, you should always ask yourself 3 questions when thinking about something in finance:

1) what has happened that caused this thing i'm thinking about to change drastically? and why?

2) what COULD happen that could cause this thing i'm thinking about to change drastically? and why?

3) what does this tell me about the overall thing i'm thinking about? and how sensitive is this thing to other factors it depends on, or that depend on it? and why?

from there, you can then try to get a sense of what that thing is and that understanding should help you see the signs of change in the wind before others who don't thinkn that hard about each aspect that they learn.

is that what you were looking for? let me know if you need/want clarification on anything.

thanks,
Barron