I attended an investment seminar in the spring and was surprised to learn just how many decisions–outside of picking stocks–go into choosing good investments.

Did you know there is a Small Business Optimism Index that measures the optimism (or lack thereof) and how it lines up with our President’s policies?

Tariffs are obviously a sensitive topic. You can’t really talk about tariffs without talking about Trump, and you can’t talk about Trump without upsetting someone, but it was very interesting to see the chart of what other countries are taxing us vs what we’re taxing them, and I’m curious to see how that plays out.

Mostly, what I’m learning is that you really need to pay attention to everything that’s happening in the world in order to make decisions on the stock market. It’s not just watching the stock market go up and down; so much else comes into play, like national and foreign policies, the US economy, the global economy, the environment, the EPA, who the current president is, and what his/her plans are, the healthcare system, the list goes on. There’s so much that you have to be reasonably informed about and come to intelligent conclusions about, and then defend those conclusions. The seminar I attended did a really good job of illustrating that. It showed me just how much affects investment decisions, and I think that’s important for people to understand.