Tools of an analyst

Now that I have been an analyst for two years, I feel I should throw some gyaan around. So here are some tricks of the trade.

First things first, if you are supposed to appear or be a good analyst in any field, you need to understand and learn to speak that field's language, including unnecessary jargon. While if one is good at appearing to be good at something then its the best because the person does not have to make an effort to excel at many things - just one thing - appearing to be good at everything.

Okay, now I do not possess such a divine skill. All I have is an average brain with average number of grey cells and storage bytes. So how do I keep myself updated on the latest in this immense world that is consumer business?

There are three things that I do:

• Trust my brain to remember stuff and assign enough importance to important stuff.
• Never deny any source of information or treat any piece of information as unnecessary. Read it, glance through it, or just save it for reading later, but do not let it slip through.
• Use technology - yes we get most of our information online, but we also get most of our information storing and prompting tools online.

This post actually is regarding using technology to keep yourself updated as an analyst. So let us start with my favorite - Twitter. If one follows the right people and publications (other than friends) then it is really a matter of how many articles can you skim through and how many can you read. If you follow a lot of people on Twitter, then it becomes slightly difficult. Worry not! Twitterdeck is here. This is a desktop software that allows you to classify tweets. So I can follow Retail tweets separately and friends separately.

Another tech tool that I came across and I have to say I changed my default browser because of it is Read Later add-in in Firefox. You can literally assign yourself homework on some other project while working on your current one. There is something called Frame-It as well, that allows you to comment on static homepages and saves your comments. So practically it is like writing a comment in the margin of a book.

RSS feeds help me keep updated in a similar fashion as Twitter, just that I am more comfortable clicking a tinyurl to open some informative article rather than go through a maze of RSS feeds. I still plan to use them, because as I said, there is no point in filtering out information before reading it.

A couple of websites I love when searching for news - www.silobreaker.com - a great aggregator of news that shows news trends as well, WSJ website, and Economist.com.

If you think this post is weird, it perhaps is. I am just a information seeking maniac and love each and every tool that gives me more of it. Many of them have helped me improve my work in my job and thats the payback for all the effort.

Hope some of this weird post was useful. Enjoy!