Information plays a huge role in a person’s professional and personal life. In the age of the Internet, when all kinds of magazines, books, courses, and workshops are widely available, the information field turns out to be quite contradictory: there is too much data and its quality and reliability are often doubtful.
Accurate, truthful, and timely information is essential to running a successful business, especially when it comes to investment market analysts. Sergey Kartashov (Sergejs Kartasovs), CEO of Cypriot asset management company Generation Partners, told us how to correctly filter out information and not get lost in the news stream. Sergey, an investment management specialist, has over 10 years of experience in the banking sector and five years in IT.
Big & Fast & Smart Data
Information overload is a phenomenon and problem that we face now and will inevitably keep on dealing with further. As we record and generate an increasing amount of information every second, we also need to quickly understand what that information is. Time is an essential aspect for most of the business processes: from monitoring traffic to trading stocks.
Big Data is large-scale analytics, predictive modeling, and visualization of the information. But it is also important, according to Sergey Kartashov, to get “fast” and “smart” data. Smart Data means information that really makes sense. It is the difference between looking at a long list of numbers related to weekly sales and identifying peaks and valleys in sales over time. After all, algorithms turn meaningless numbers into a big picture.
Talking about “fast data,” we mean real-time information that allows us to make decisions in real time. The retailer needs to know how their latest collection is selling right after release. A bank needs to be aware of geopolitical and socio-economic situations in order to make the best investment decisions using a global macro strategy.
According to Sergey Kartashov, Big & Fast & Smart Data is crucial for modern investors, because timely and clear information is becoming more important, and it often plays a big role in making smart and informed decisions in business. But in order to do this, you need to focus on the main thing, that is, filter the information.
Evaluation
Big data gives an investor an objective analysis: useless information can be discarded in order to focus on a few things that really matter. In our case, this is the selection of companies for investing. At this stage, it is important to audit and build an investment basket.
You need to get information about the actual state of affairs: level of employees’ experience, quality of management, business plan, a vision of the company’s development for a certain number of years.
Diversification
After another stage of screening, the investor should choose the best investment offers, that is, to actually assess the ratio of risks and rewards. Any investment goes along with the possibility of losing everything.
Sergey Kartashov noted that today we have a lot of risky startups that can bring large profits in the future or vice versa. At this stage, the investor should diversify assets: invest in different instruments, choose complex strategies, and combine different methods of generating income.
