Remembering the News / Connecting the dots

Hey guys,

I'm a STEM major but I've been able to teach myself a lot of the finance technicals for interviews. However 1 thing I see myself wasting a lot of time on is reading the news. There is so much noise and information, i'm finding it's hard to connect the dots and recall all of this info efficiently. I can barely remember what I read 2-weeks ago even though I completely understood the articles when reading them. In the end, I would've been better off reading something more memorable!

Do you think this is just something the solves itself over time as I become more and more well read? or do you think I should be writing down notes and actively recording trends in the news so I can quickly review what happened 2 months ago?

As an example, I was trying to analyze if going long chinese equities is a decent trade. I was able to instantly remember that asian equities are really sucking (MSCI asia lagging), the Shanghai index hit a pretty big low (don't remember how big), etc. but I couldn't connect the dots and remember things like the japanese earthquake, chinese elections, the china-japan standoff over the islands without reading some older news.

My mentor told me that a lot of his current investment ideas were developed a long time ago - he is just waiting for the right conditions to execute his inventory of trades. That kind of suggests actively summarizing big trends in the news and referring back to old-work.

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