Home TRAVEL TIPS What Can You Learn About Investing as You Travel?

What Can You Learn About Investing as You Travel?

Traveling the world is one of the best ways of opening your mind to new experiences and ideas, but could it also work in terms of investments? The following are some of the interesting investing benefits that you can hope to gain from your travels.

Image by Steve Buissinne

Understand the Scale and Success of Global Companies

Investing in stocks is still one of the most rewarding ways of making your money grow. In this respect, the more you know about the value of a company the better. This is best done by looking into their stock history and checking out the latest economic analysis pieces by market experts, taking into account the main different ways of analyzing stocks.

Yet, you might also be interested to see the global scale of the companies you’re interested in, and how successful they are around the planet. Do you see American chains like Starbucks and Walmart having a lot of success in other countries, or are there brands you’ve never heard of before that appear to be everywhere? Naturally, you don’t want to invest purely on what you see with your own eyes as this can give a superficial and misleading image, but rather than basing your investments purely on what you read online, you can also add the evidence you see to get a fuller picture of a company.

See Diverse Economic Factors

The factors that affect your investments are diverse and the more you know about them the better. As with the previous point, you shouldn’t expect to be able to make fully-informed decisions about the global economy just based on what you see. However, seeing the way that the economy works in different countries is a great starting point.

As well as this, it makes sense to use tools like the economic calendar, which lets you see factors including the results of the consumer confidence survey from Spain, the Italian industrial production numbers, and the German inflation updates. Once you’ve seen the real-life situation in a country, you might find that reading these reports completes the picture in your mind and helps you to decide what investments to make in the future.

“Manhattan Financial District Skyline” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Ken Lund

Speak to Different People

Another of the huge benefits of traveling is that you get to meet so many people from different walks of life. It’s not necessary for any of them to be investment experts, as you’ll simply be gathering information from diverse sources on your travels. Everyone that you meet will have a certain type of information and experience that you can use, so it’s a question of listening to what others say and working out whether their information has any bearing on your investments.

This is another way is simply gaining new knowledge and perhaps storing away interesting information to research and possibly act on later. It’s all part of your financial education and working out how you want to get the best potential return on your money. For example, you might hear that the property market is booming in Mexico or that Brazilian stocks are growing at a fast pace, and this is the sort of detail that you can then verify by looking online at the latest trends.

These are all simple ways of learning about investments as you travel, and they can be applied no matter where in the world you travel. However, you should bear in mind that it’s only part of the learning curve and that you need to carry out additional investigations before working out how to invest your money.