"Standard route to profit" currently featured in TOYOKEIZAI ONLINE column

Hello, this is Matsushita.

There is a shortest route to profit in investing.

However, many investors do not try to follow this shortest route.

They don’t know that this is the shortest route,

and they cannot even imagine it.

That shortest route is,

“to list your own challenges to profit and

to solve them one by one.”

It’s incredibly simple.

Yet you do not take this shortest route,

and today you still check stock prices and currency rates,

read newspapers and economic column articles,

and look at charts to buy and sell.

That route does not lead to the goal.

If you are not making a profit,

there is a clear cause = a challenge.

Most of those challenges are

a lack of knowledge.

If you are losing money,

there is surely a challenge there,

and unless you resolve and overcome it

you will not reach profitability.

The first challenge is lack of knowledge,

and it cannot be resolved just by reading newspapers, or

by checking prices and charts.

The best way to eliminate knowledge gaps is

to read books.

Attending seminars and listening to people who are actually profitable

is also educational.

This is a solution to the challenge of insufficient knowledge,

and there are many other challenges as well.

List every possible challenge you can think of,

prioritize them, and start solving from the highest priority

one by one.

If there are twelve challenges,

solving them one by one will make them all disappear in

twelve steps.

However, many investors do not look at their own challenges.

What this person is looking at is not themselves but the outside world = the market and information.

That is not the shortest route,

and it is not a path leading to the goal,

so this investor cannot profit.

You do not need to trade right now.

Because you have not clarified your own challenges,

and you have not resolved them.

Since December 2004, when I first started teaching people about investing,

I have always taught like this.

“Problems are resolved once they are made clear.”

Now, if you are losing money and

there are still challenges to making a profit,

it is because the challenges have not been made clear in the first place.

Stop checking prices, stop checking charts,

and look at yourself, list your challenges, and write them down.

Once you have written down the challenges,

prioritize them and rearrange them.

And, think deeply about how to solve the top-priority challenges and carry it out relentlessly.