MotorcycleBoy
Despite Mel and I only being in private investment since March this year, I am amazed by how easy it is for someone with an amount of computer skills to analyse firms. For example I can obtain annual reports and financial statements for any UK Public ltd co. with ease online. Then figures can be copy+pasted into spreadsheets and analysed. It takes me a couple of hours to set up 4 or 5 years previous years of a firms business in a sheet and make some views/judgements on their financial strengths/weaknesses. Then if needs be the PDF files can be converted text files and word counts performed i.e. counting occurances of words like "headwinds", "challenging", "covenant" etc.
Whilst I'm not saying that any of the above "makes me a better investor"
far from it!, but clearly this kind of thing has only really been accessible for about the past 10-15 years or so. (I know we had the net and PCs prior, but the likes of I had very poor comms. i.e. broadband, links until, well actually quite recently).
Indeed I'm impressed by how well people have performed prior to the PC/internet revolution.....presumably people only got wind of annual reports via. the post, and had to spend hours poring over them.
You are doing exactly the sort of stuff I used to do, all the kind of things that will get you good marks in examinations etc and which will make you feel like you understand the financial world.
Maybe this will work for you, for me it was a complete failure.
My fundamental error was to believe that the methods I used in my physics degree, PhD and research would work in the world of finance. That logic and thought was all that was needed to master investing and trading as it was how I got to get my PhD and research contracts etc.
Investment and trading however are not logical pursuits and are instead disciplines of emotion, of crowd behaviour, over reaction and animal like passions. They are nothing like physics.
E.g. God or nature, choose your belief, does not suddenly decided that the inverse square law is boring and instead goes for an inverse cube or what ever as pleases and change again and again. Markets however do exactly this sort of thing. If by reading and analysing you get into your mind a set of beliefs, you are going to get murdered investing and trading.
Markets behave like crowds at a sports game, roller coasters of highs and lows although the players are constrained by the rules of the sport as to what can happen there are no rules as to how high or low the spectators can get.
The positives and virtues of a business can be loved by the market then in the next moment loathed and vice versa. None of this is ever caught in the annual reports which in the UK are only 6 monthly snap shots written to be as positive as possible and which often tell you things that are potentially useful at some time but they never tell you when.
The idea that the modern world puts everyone on a level playing field is purely academic, it does not because everything endlessly changes and what was in a report is mostly already known and if not the share price will react very quickly and then it becomes a game of sustainability or not. To keep up with things you need the daily inputs from folk who are studying price action and buying or selling as they see fit, not according to some fundamentals but according to what the price has done and what other opportunities there are and a whole host of emotional things. This is exactly what the media does not provide, they are mostly writers who can't own equities and who get paid for crafting logical stories that often are at odds with what market participants are doing.
Going back through markets to Jesse Livermore and before there have always been people who could make a lot of money while others with similar and sometimes those with more sophisticated market intelligence did not. One can see the same with Buffett and Munger, they have no special knowledge in many cases and yet are billionaires whereas most money managers even those paid millions to manage money are not.
To prosper in the market you have to have a background of knowledge but that along is insufficient, you must also have market savvy, or emotional intelligence. This can be learned, some folk have it as a gift, most can't learn it and there are a large bunch of charlatans who profess to have market skills and prosper by convincing folk to pay them money for rubbish. This applies to both fundamental and technical analysis. Then there are the con folk often found on the AIM market who make a good living from the sort of villainy that Dickens used to rail against and who yet come over has clever and sophisticated market participants.
Large amounts of money can be made in markets and life changing opportunities come by each day and yet most people fail to make money and only prosper if holding are kept for a life time and then it is the children and those who inherit who splash the money against porcelain.
imho if you want to make some serious money in the markets in a time scale that will allow you to enjoy it you need to study a lot more than accounts and you need to trash most everything you have learned from the media and classic texts. All of this is extremely hard work and very few people manage it.
Good luck!