How to invest well depends on the kind of corporate research you have time to do. Meaning someone working full time in medicine simply doesn't have enough time to research stocks, follow stuff in Bloomberg, etc. So your best investments will still be to pay fund managers to do the research for you, through mutual funds or other similar investments.
And for porn, you could have done this before med school, and probably are past your porn prime by the time you graduate, agewise.
Please do realize that most analysts and fund managers more or less just makes stuff up. Discounted Cash Flows analyses, and even comp valuation are total jokes.
And I say this with a large chunk of my US extended family working as investment bankers and hedge funders.
If you want some pretty hilarious reading about those analyst reports, just google for mary meeker's hilarious youtube valuation report.
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/08/mary-meeker-bac.html
Basically she misread some numbers then made up an analysis. But since correcting the mathematical error would have resulted in her analysis claiming that Youtube can generate $720,000 of revenue per year (after Google paid almost $2 billion) she ended up fudging every single other number in her analysis just so her "corrected" report wouldn't look totally *****ic.
And mind you she's one of the top technology bankers out there
That's not to say that there aren't super talented hedge fund managers out there, but by and large don't assume the average manager is going to do anything except charge you a lot of fees.
An interesting strategy I read about is to invest only in index funds but swap them out as you see fit. So swap between a European index, Asia-Pacific index, Small Cap Index, Financials index, etc. That way you can still attempt to use some vague strategy or another without having to read too much about any particular company. Then I'd probably just add on the occasional random stocks that for some reason you've come to believe is going to be totally awesome.
That way you'll avoid overpaying fund manager fees (index funds essentially just mirror an index, sector, or region in terms of their makeup, so fees are very low, usually around a quarter percent or even less compared to up to two percent with most mutual funds-losing 2% is a huge deal when you compound it out for 30 years).
BTW this strategy is from a former Goldman Sachs partner who writes for the Wall Street Journal, and it's the strategy he uses on his own money.
Hedge funds are a little different than mutual funds though, since most hedge funds have a lot of their OWN money invested. Most mutual fund managers have either very little or even none of their own money in the fund-so either way they get their fee from you. This isn't to say that every hedge fund manager is brilliant, but at least they'll make decisions like their own money depends on it (plus much of their income comes from fees on profits, so that's another incentive there).
Since most of us can't just up and invest in hedge funds it's kind of a moot point though.
But seriously if you want to invest I'd probably read the wall street journal every day for like a year before doing anything serious, if only to get an idea of what everything means. Also, I find Evan Newmark's blog on the wall street journal website an awesome read-about everything from getting fired (written for the many, many, readers who are getting laid off on wall street), to his hilarious writeup about M&A bankers. If you read his biography you'll see that he really does know Wall Street very, very, well....which is also why his investing advice linked below is solid advice.
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2008/06/05/mean-street-the-secret-of-my-investing-success/
That said, I'm gonna be a ******* and probably end up using half my money to attempt to beat the market myself. More fun that way
😉 Plus some portion of my ego wants to compete against my wall street friends and family, although I'll still never, ever, ever, make anything near as much as they do =(
