This is actually a response to a client who asked to know what I do regularly that might benefit him. There are many things I could suggest, but I’d like to highlight just three.

Follow academic research

Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I am disdainful of financial news. I liken it to highway noise and I think that listening to it won’t get you anywhere. I am, however, an avid reader of peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, etc. These journals contain the best and most rigorous research on the subjects of finance and investment. That’s why I can confidently tell my clients, whatever I do with their money, that I can back up my actions with rigorous peer-reviewed research from the best minds of the world.

Take classes at Oxford

I am enrolled in an EMBA program at Oxford University now. I travel to Oxford to take classes for one week out of every month. On top of the new knowledge I am gaining, the most valuable facet of the course is my 70 classmates who hail from all five continents. Among them are central bankers and senior executives of massive enterprises and multinational companies. Of course, there are small businessmen like me as well. The insights I am able to glean from my classmates are far beyond any I could possibly get sitting in my comfortable office in North America.

Read the other half of the world

You may not know this, but I can read Chinese. I spend some time every day following Chinese media in the Chinese-speaking world of Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Taiwan, and of course China. I recently did a fun back-of-the-envelope calculation, and the economies of these places add up to $27trillion by PPP measure. That’s even higher than the combined $25trillion of the five main English speaking nations (US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.) Ignorance of what’s going on in the other half of the world is incompetence.

(Feel free to share if you find it insightful.)