Many people think that investing is mostly about maths. Do the numbers, they say, and everything else will follow. If only! In fact, I’d say that maths is only a small part of good investing. Sure, it helps to know your numbers and be able to do some arithmetic, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Investors with a narrow focus are generally unsuccessful. You can do the numbers until you’re blue in the face but if you don’t have a wide view of the world and what’s going on, you’re likely to be blindsided by events and become an investment follower.

Most people who have observed investors in action would say that the best of them are polymaths (someone whose knowledge spans many different subjects), or ‘walking encyclopaedias’, in other words. Top investors know about a lot of different things, not just maths, not just economics and the state of the markets, and not just how businesses work to make money.

In fact, they know about politics, they know how crowds work, they know the prevailing zeitgeist and what the general public are thinking and feeling. They are curious and there is nothing they do not want to stick their enquiring noses into.

A serious investor wants to know a whole host of things: history, biology, geography, psychology, technology, geopolitics, sociology, law, chemistry… Oh, yes – and a little bit of math as well.

There is no field of human knowledge that investors can simply ignore – they need to understand the basics of nearly everything, or be prepared to learn it. An attractive investment can pop up in any field or be influenced by many things - and to understand a company and what it does, it helps to know a lot about a lot.

The best investors are big readers and quick learners. They read company reports, books, news sites, research reports and articles. They try to understand the things that are happening in the world and how people are thinking and feeling. They want to know the drivers of events and how these events will affect their holdings.

The best investors know instantly how any event will affect the investments they own – they need to know what is a flash-in-the-pan and what is a deep-seated trend that is likely to endure. One is to be ignored, the other played for profit.

They need to figure out how they should approach any particular trend. That also requires industry knowledge which comes from lots of study. For example, Artificial Intelligence has been discussed and commented on for years. However, only those who’d studied and developed deep knowledge of the industry would’ve invested early in Nvidia (the company that currently makes most of the chips for AI). Nvidia has been the big winner in AI so far and those who knew the landscape were in early.

Curiosity is probably the most valuable human trait for an investor. The desire to know and understand how and why things work is critical for investment selection. Curiosity drives study and, far from a chore, the work is at least interesting for the curious, if not always easy.

Good investors know their targets. They may be only going to buy a few shares in a company, but they treat that purchase as if they were spending millions or billions to buy the whole thing. They know the business, they know its competitors, they know the industry, they know the environment that is good or bad for its operations.

If all of this sounds like very hard work, it is. The demands required to beat the market are the biggest reason that I stopped managing my own investments; I now rely on managed funds and advisers.