Everyone loves lists it seems for this time of year, so I have complied my own. They are not all the same type of items, just important things that came up this past year. They are certainly not all the best investment ideas I had.

1) Net Net Stocks- My favorite investment technique. Old Ben Graham was almost all right this past year, at least on the NCAV stocks I invested in, before Chroma Investing and since.

2) Buffett is right Management is important.  Of course you want them to be ethical, but as he has said you want management whose interests are aligned with shareholders. Two of my least profitable investments VXGN and GSIG were problems exclusively because of poor management.

3) I’d rather invest my own money than trust someone else to do it for me, even if it is more work. For many investors this is not true. They will be better served with an index fund or trying to hitch their star to one of the very few exceptional investment managers like Seth Klarman or Joel Greenblatt.

4) When you do well in investing you can do very, very well indeed. Warren Buffett has also famously said that if he had a million dollars to invest he could guarantee a 50% return. My returns since Lehman brothers failed have been exceptional to me, well over 100%. I am most happy that I was able to continue to make money as the market slide down from October to March. And doubly happy I was not afraid in March and April to pick up bargains.

5) Always cover your ass. Or watch out for what can bite your investment in the back side. Preservation of capital is paramount. If something changes about a company, including new information is revealed that is negative, don’t be afraid to change your investment position.

6) Don’t assume that your success is all skill. So, while I am happy that I made money since Lehman, I am also aware that some of my success is undoubtably luck.

7) Don’t slavishly follow any investment guru. I followed Klarman into an investment if Facet (FACT), and because it was a NET NET stock.  But I was fortunate enough to avoid the costly mistake he made in RHIE, a position from which he recently exited.

I love investing, particularly the figuring out what is going to work. The fall has been a confusing time for me when I mostly stayed out of any new investments because I was convinced the market was due for a correction. I may still be right on that, but I wasn’t for the entire fall, and probably missed out on some deals.

9) Diversifying your portfolio accross many asset classes is only a good idea if you are willing to your money over to other money managers or you happen to be an expert in losts of investment vehicles.

10) The Efficient Market Theory is the single stupidest idea I have ever heard of. It still makes me laugh that anyone EVER took it seriously. It goes hand in hand with the other dumbest idea I ever heard, which is that humans act rationally. Thank God we have behavioral Finance and the Austrian School.

Not much of a list, but I am not sure that lists, per se, have all that much value. And I am a value investor after all.

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