Everyone can become an investor!

The image of an investor is often surrounded by a mysterious halo of special knowledge and insights, moreover, the skills attributed to investors are deemed as not accessible to the majority of other people. For this reason, a lot of people with considerable savings avoid the field of investment considering themselves insufficiently competent in these matters.

A recent study of financial literacy level in American investors conducted by the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has completely debunked these stereotypes: https://www.usfinancialcapability.org/downloads/NFCS_2018_Inv_Survey_Full_Report.pdf. Poor results of the financial knowledge test for the investors from the United States - the country of entrepreneurs and financiers - get you thinking about the qualification level of professional investors around the world. This entails the only conclusion: most people who invest extra money do not have any special knowledge, so everyone can become an investor and earn money from investing in promising projects!

Now about the test: according to the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, two in three people out of the 2,000 participants in the American investor survey failed in the questionnaire. Only a third of the respondents were able to correctly answer 5 or more questions out of 10, and the average score was only 4.7 points out of the 10 possible points.

However, the poor results of the test did not make the survey participants doubt the efficiency of their own portfolios: 29% of the investors believe that the return on their investment portfolio will exceed the average market indicators, and only 4% expect a return lower than the average.

The majority of investors (75 %) report that they have access to high-quality information necessary for making informed investment decisions. Online websites, free services and blogs are the most popular data sources for 46 % of the survey participants, while another 42 % of the investors closely follow publications in newspapers, magazines and read books. Only 17% of the respondents receive useful information from social media, and such tools as BrokerCheck or Investor.gov are used by only 7% and 9% of the investors respectively.

The digital age debunks the established clichés and opens equal access to information for all groups and categories of Internet users.

No wonder the famous billionaire investor Warren Buffett said: "We don't need to be smarter than others. We must be more disciplined than others." Therefore, it's up to you to decide if you want to be an investor or not. Everything depends on your goals and perseverance.

By the way, not so long ago we wrote about the sources of information that are used by professional investors. You may want to re-read this list again.