Loss avoidance must be the cornerstone of your investment philosophy.

We suppose that could be considered a hedged position for the awards committee, one that would never occur in the hard sciences such as physics and chemistry, where a prize shared among three with divergent views would be an embarrassing mistake or a bad joke. While a Nobel Prize might well be the culmination of a life’s work, shouldn’t the work accurately describe the real world?

Limit risk with: Deep analysis Bargain purchase Sensitivity analysis.

In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a speculative undertaking.

Short-term performance envy causes many of the shortcomings that lock most investors into a perpetual cycle of underachievement. Watch your competitors not out of jealousy but out of respect and focus your efforts not on replicating others' portfolios but on looking for opportunities where they are not. The only way for investors to significantly outperform is to periodically stand far apart from the crowd, something few are willing, or able, to do.

If another person were to enter the building, it would once again be empty.

Investing today may well be harder than it has been at any time in our three decades of existence.