TOP 20 LESSONS LEARNED FROM BOOK - “ONE UP ON WALL STREET"

1. This is investing, where the smart money isn’t so smart, and the dumb money isn’t really as dumb as it thinks. Dumb money is only dumb when it listens to the smart money.

2. Stop listening to professionals! Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert.

3. The trick is not to learn to trust your gut feelings, but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them. 

Stand by your stocks as long as the fundamental story of the company hasn’t changed.

4. Know what you own, and know why you own it.

5. People who succeed in the stock market also accept periodic losses, setbacks, and unexpected occurrences. 

Calamitous drops do not scare them out of the game.

6. What the stock price does today, tomorrow, or next week is only a distraction.

7. Remember, things are never clear until it’s too late.

8. When you sell in desperation, you always sell cheap.

9. It takes remarkable patience to hold on to a stock in a company that excites you, but which everybody else seems to ignore.

10. The typical big winners generally take three to ten years or more to play out.

11. When looking at the same sky, people in mature industries see clouds whereas people in immature industries see pie.

12. Stocks you trade, it's wives you're stuck with.

13. The more cash that builds up in the treasury (of companies), the greater the pressure to piss it away.

14. You have to keep your priorities straight, if you plan to do well in stocks.

15. People can get incredibly valuable fundamental information from their jobs that may not reach professionals for months or even years.

16. Separate all stock tips from the tipper, even if the tipper is very smart and very rich, and his or her last tip went up.

17. Long shots almost never pay off.

It’s better to miss the first move in a stock and wait to see if a company’s plans are working out.

18. All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don’t work out.

19. It is personal preparation, as much as knowledge and research, that distinguishes the successful stock picker from the chronic loser. 

Ultimately it is not the stock market nor even the companies themselves that determine an investor’s fate. 

It is the investor.

20. When the neighbors tell me what to buy and then I wish I had taken their advice, it’s a sure sign that the market has reached a top and is due for a tumble.