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Hard technical skills are a baseline for analysts. That said, the best investors on the planet have attuned their senses to the softer skills of investing. Pattern and bias recognition, behavioural economics, thinking in terms of probabilities, scenarios and distributions. These are skills we all need to develop.

Numbers tell stories. They provide us with the opening chapters, with which we build our investment theses. A poor analytical foundation often leads to poorly built investment ideas.

Financial models allow us to ask questions, to run scenarios and stress sensitivities, allowing us to test hypotheses. Financial model building is a multifaceted skill set, pulling on not just Excel knowledge, but also accounting, analysis, valuation and behavioural skillsets.

Research, including our own suggests that over 70% of acquisitions fail to achieve a return on equity sufficient to cover the cost of equity value. M&A deals often are value-destructive. Why? One reason is the market preponderance to analyzing the growth of EPS as a market of value creation. This analysis couldn't be more misaligned with value creation.

LBO modeling isn't a skill just required for private equity analysts. This is something you should know as an investment analyst. To be able to model debt in detail, to assess credit risks and to be able to disaggregate the source of equity value creation - these are all skills needed in the toolkit of every investment analyst.

In a world where numbers can dominate, data visualization offers a skillset where we can take the insights our numbers gives us and allow us to communicate these insights to an audience with clarity and transparency. Numbers tell stories. Visualization is the storyteller.