When it comes to investing, knowing what you need to know is more important than just knowing things.
说到投资，知道自己需要什么比了解投资产品更重要。

 

You Don't Need to Have an Opinion on Every Stock or Investment
你不需要懂每一只股票或投资产品

One of the things that successful investors tend to have in common is that they do not have an opinion on every stock in the Universe.
成功的投资者共有的一个特点就是他们并不懂全球所有股票。

The major brokerage firms, asset management groups, and commercial banks seem to feel like it is necessary to attach a rating to everything security that is traded.
大型经纪公司、资产管理集团和商业银行好像都感觉有必要对所有安全交易进行评级。

Some popular financial talk show hosts take pride in espousing their view on virtually every business that’s traded.
有些著名的财经访谈节目主持人对能评价所有的交易业务引以为傲。

While this can be useful when looking at corporate bonds and discovering whether they trade more toward the AAA rating or junk bond side of the spectrum, in a lot of cases, this obsession with metrics is somewhat nonsensical.
虽然这在观察企业债券并弄清是把钱投在了AAA级投资产品还是投在了垃圾债券时很有用，但在很多情况下，对指标的迷信有点荒谬。

Investing is not an exact science. Paraphrasing two of the industries’ priests, you don't need to know a man's exact weight to know that he is fat, nor do you need to know a basketball player's exact height to know he is very tall.
投资并非精密科学。借用两位行业专家的话，你不需要知道一个人的具体体重就能知道他很胖，你也不需要知道一个篮球球员的具体身高就能知道他很高。

If you focus on only acting in those few instances where you have a clear winner and watch for opportunities that come along every once in a while, sometimes years apart, you are likely to do better than the Wall Street analysts that stay up nights trying to decide if Union Pacific is worth $50 or $52.
如果你只关注几种投资产品，确定自己稳赚，并找准偶尔出现的机会，有时是多年不遇的时机，你就能比华尔街分析师做得还要好，他们可能还要熬几宿来确定美国联合太平洋铁路公司的股票值$50还是$52。

Instead, you wait till the stock is trading at $28 then pounce. When you find a truly excellent business, you are often best served through near total passivity and holding until death.
你就可以等着直到该股票以$28交易时就下手，你发现真正好的商机时，通常是在几乎完全被动的情况下一辈子持有这只股票就能大赚一笔。

This approach has minted a lot of secret millionaires, including janitors earning near minimum wage and sitting atop $8,000,000 fortunes.
这个方法造就了大批神秘百万富翁，包括门卫都能赚着最低工资，却坐拥8百万美元的资产。

Why do investors find it so hard to admit that they don't have a clear-cut opinion about a specific business at the current market price? Often, pride and, to some degree mental discomfort over the unknown, is the culprit.
为什么投资者不愿意承认他们对于目前市场价格的某个特定投资产品并不十分清楚呢？通常是自尊心以及在某种程度上对未知的心理不适在作祟。

For more information on how to overcome these forces, read Rationality: The Investor’s Secret Weapon.
想要获取更多关于如何克服这些阻力的信息，请阅读《Rationality: The Investor’s Secret Weapon》。

 

Know Every Company (Or at Least, a Whole Lot of Them!)
了解每家公司（或至少大多数公司！）

Even if you don't have an opinion on the specific attractiveness of most stocks at any given moment, you should know as many businesses as you can across as many sectors and industries as you can. 
即使在特定时期你不懂大多数股票的特定优势，你也应该尽可能多了解多个行业和产业的公司。

This means being familiar with things like return on equity and return on assets. 
这意味着你能熟悉股本回报率和资产回报率这样的东西。

It means understanding why two businesses that appear similar on the surface can have very different underlying economic engines; what separates a good business from a great business.
也能理解为什么两个产品表面上看起来差不多，却有着截然不同的潜在经济引擎，这也是好的产品和优秀产品的区别所在。

When asked what advice he would give a young investor trying to enter the business today, Warren Buffett said that he would systematically get to know as many businesses as he could because that bank of knowledge would serve as a tremendous asset and competitive advantage.
沃伦•巴菲特在被问及会给现在想进入商界的年轻投资者什么建议时，曾说过他会系统地尽可能多了解一些投资产品，因为这一知识库将成为巨大资产和竞争优势。

For example, when something happened that you thought would increase the profits of copper companies, if you knew the industry ahead of time, including the relative position of the different firms, you'd be able to act much more quickly and with a much more complete understanding of the full picture, than if you had to become familiar with not only the industry but all of the players within it over a compressed period of time. 
比如有你觉得会提高铜矿企业利润的事情发生时，如果你提前了解了这一产业，包括不同企业的相对地位，就比你在有限时间内要熟悉这一产业以及所有产业内的公司能更快采取行动，思虑得也更周全。

(Realize that there are no shortcuts for this step if your aim is mastery. When the host of the television show responded to Buffett, "But there are 24,000 publicly traded companies!" Warren responded, "Start with the A’s").
（你要明白，想要掌控全局就没有捷径可走。当电视节目主持人反问巴菲特：“但上市公司有24,000家呢！”，巴菲特回答说：“从行业领先的开始了解吧。”）

 

（翻译：菲菲）