An admittedly long time has passed since my last update. It has been a tumultuous year for me. On the personal side, there was the birth of my first child, followed by the return of some of my stepchildren to the household under unfortunate circumstances. We now have a household of five kids. Given that I didn’t have any kids just four years ago, that has been quite the adjustment for me. Meanwhile, on the professional side, I have been on some side projects at work, while also preparing for the next level of the CFA program.
Understandably, writing has taken a back seat amongst all my activities. However that does not mean I have stopped studying, analyzing and refining my investing techniques. A big portion of my off time over the past year has been spent reading and re-reading books, research articles and ideas from all over the blogosphere. A lot of what I’ve seen has been interesting and helpful. A lot of it still has been… less useful. But the important thing has been learning something new every day, trying it out for myself and applying it. That has led me to tweak my investing criteria in different ways. The broad principles of value investing guide me as always, it is to me the most logical philosophy. For the time being I am much more comfortable relying on simple quantitative analysis, à la old school Graham or Schloss style. Investing is never a static discipline and there is always room to grow. I will elaborate in the future on my current views, methods and where I see my thoughts evolving on investing.
In the meantime, while I wasn’t writing for most of the past year, I have continued to actively manage simulated portfolios. I now have profiles on Investopedia.com (profile name: kgateau), Marketocracy.com (kgateau) and the Motley Fool at Fool.com (konradgateau). My profile on Fool.com is publicly available to see. I’ll have to see if the others can also be viewed publicly. I’ll comment on my successes and failures so far and my general portfolio compositions. For now, it is great to be back and writing.
