INVESTMENT MANIFESTO

1. Listen to nobody. Most of them are idiots. Those that aren't idiots are trying to fleece you.
2. Trust yourself.
3. Measure risk as inattention.
4. Develop an utter intolerance of loss.
5. Aim high. Very high.
6. 26% is needed to double in three years.
7. Back your hunches.
8. Focus on concentration rather than diffusion.
9. Reinforce succeses heavily.
10. Do not reinforce failures.
11. Become a gardener. Nurture things which are growing in the right way. Weed regularly and ruthlessly.
12. Develop an indifference to any emotional factors associated with the holding. They are nice / do good things has no place.
13. Forget ethical investments. They are for wankers.
14. Investments are always short term. Long termism is a way of cheating the ordinary man on the Clapham omnibus into handing his money over to sharp players who know this is not true.
15. Volatilty = profit.
16. Buy on ups.
17. Sell on downs.
18. Penny shares invariably have idiotic spreads, and prove illiquid when you try and sell them. Man, I've been burnt by this one.
19. There is no substitute for sensible research.
20. You do not need to be any kind of expert to do sensible research. Sensible research questions are:
21. Is the trend up?
22. Is it volatile?
23. Are they making money?
24. Are they big enough to be sound and small enough to grow?
25. Are they adding net equity?
26. Are they solvent?
27. Is the P/E ludicrous?
28. Do you understand how they make money?
29. Does it seem like a growth market?
30. Funds don't decrease risk, they increase it, as they build in inattention in their liquidity profile.
31. Moreover, a lot of fund managers ARE long termers, and therefore miss the profit from volatilty. And they charge you a %, win or lose.
32. Funds are useful to access markets otherwise unavailable.
33. ETFs cover most of these better and cheaper.
34. The past is not an indicator of future performance. Yeah, right. Just like if you were England manager, whether a player had scored in every single game, or had never played football before would never enter your head.
35. To really make money, start with a lot of money.
36. Enjoy the learning as well as the profits.
37. Don't believe a word I say. Work it out for yourself.