When picking stocks, keep it simple?

"Investing is part science and part art, and going for a business you would like to own works best" - Gabriel Chen, small change, invest, July 11, 2010 thesundaytimes

Gabriel is talking about first-half of the World Cup Final, the second-half of the match comes from "part luck and part intuition"

"Stock picking is part science, part art, part luck, part intuition, and always uncertain - "not precisely knowing." - ???? (Forgotten)


Part Luck

When one works harder, one gets lucky. So to improve our luck in our investing, we may need to put in a  minimum of 10,000 hours hard work

Part Intuition

"The intuitive mind is a scared gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." - Albert Einstein

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk

"The best purpose of gut intuition is to keep us from wasting time on wrong approach and to keep our conscious, rational mind focused on what is important." - Curtis Faith, the best legendary turtle


Intuition is the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. “The word ‘intuition’ comes from the Latin word 'intueri', which is often roughly translated as meaning ‘to look inside’ or ‘to contemplate’." Intuition provides us with beliefs that we cannot necessarily justify.


When you develop your feel and intuition for the markets, you build your confidence. By doing that, you trust yourself more and you do not feel the urge to follow others including the gurus and naysayers. You are comfortable with your own conclusion even if it goes against the norm and even against the charts and analyst reports. You feel comfortable with the outcome even if it is unfavorable.

Knowing the difference between intuition and emotions is something that will come with experience. If you are making a trading decision and you find that your heart is beating fast or you have regretted after making the decision when the events turn unfavorable, you are probably making an emotional rather than an intuitive decision.
 
Fear Of Uncertainty
 
The ability to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty does not come naturally. For most people, making decisions under uncertainty is hard - very hard. Even for those TA practitioners, they will still wait for some confirmation signals before taking a leap.
 
Sometimes, we must stop analyzing further and use our intuition to make quick decisions with whatever imperfect information at hand and knowing that the outcome may be totally different than what is expected without losing our confidence to make similar decisions again.