Investing is an inherently risky business. Investors are essentially agreeing to bet on a future outcome that is not guaranteed to happen. It’s for this reason that doing your due diligence is so important.
Due diligence refers to the homework you ought to do in order to assess the risk versus reward of an investment opportunity. Whether it’s investing in properties, commodities, or securities, the more you know about the factors which influence the outcome, the better you are at making a decision.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the key aspects of doing your due diligence:
Regulated Research
Diving into the details of an investment opportunity can be a fun and exciting adventure. Learning about the individuals involved and moving parts in play provides would-be investors with an illuminated understanding of where they’d be putting their money. However, research is only as good as a person’s ability to keep track of what they learn. Using an online notepad and other means of keeping research organized is essential. This enables would-be investors to more freely explore the information they need to acquire in order to do their due diligence.
Objective Analysis
Opinions and bias abound in the world of business. What the officers and executives of a company have to say about the future is often saturated with unfounded optimism and artificial confidence. With this in mind, it’s imperative for investors to exercise caution when factoring what others have to say about a potential investment opportunity. The same can be said for the information they glean from news and other seemingly unbiased sources. The key is to collect information from different sources and compare notes. By developing a diverse spread of sources, would-be investors are better able to accurately assess the risk versus reward of an investment opportunity.
Risk Assessment
As previously mentioned, investments are inherently risky. The goal of due diligence isn’t to purge your investment decisions of risk since doing so is both impractical and inefficient. Instead, would-be investors are on a mission to calculate the risk as accurately as possible.
Known Unknowns
A common folly of would-be investors conducting due diligence is to learn absolutely everything about an investment opportunity. Doing so is simply impossible. What’s more, it leads to analysis paralysis. There will always be unknowns. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t be aware of their existence. Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece. While you can’t definitely know how the piece appears, the surrounding pieces provide you with enough inference to take an educated guess.
Confidence Threshold
Would-investors should reach a comfortable level of confidence before agreeing to invest. That’s what doing your due diligence is meant to achieve. If you’ve done all of the above and still feel nervous about an investment, chances are it’s better to walk away. Is it possible you’ll feel like a fool down the road? Sure, but it’s also possible you’ll realize you saved yourself from losing a lot of money.
Investment and risk go hand-in-hand. With that said, investors have an obligation to themselves to uncover everything they can about an investment opportunity before getting financially involved. While due diligence is not a foolproof method of avoiding the losses of a bad investment, it greatly improves the chances of making the right financial decision.