It’s that time of the year again. How did you investments perform in 2009?

I’ve been catching up with The Aleph blog today. Merkel is a fantastic writer. I even enjoy his book reviews, which are often peppered with many investing nuggets.
To a guy in search of how to fold momentum into a value approach this following insight gives me something to work on. Patience… again.
My favorite example is that as a value investor, I am almost always early.  I buy and sell too soon, and leave profits on the table.  Adding a momentum overlay can aid the value investor by delaying purchases of …

October 1982 TV debut of Peter Lynch.
Buy What You Know
“Average investor is out there in some industry…and they’re going to see those industries turn and they’re not going to buy those stocks…they have a big edge… they are months ahead of me”
Common mistake..buying a stock as it has fallen from X to two thirds or half of X. Beware bottom fishing
Peter Lynch nails the edge most amateur investors enjoy, but seldom capitalise on. Most people have an edge in the industry they work in. Funny thing is most of the money is controlled by people who …

Three great points; another reason to concentrate on EV instead of market cap, cash is more a risk than an asset and show us the money. Stop hording our cash! Graham recommending putting the dividend payout to a vote each year and management having to justify any capital expenditures. I implemented capital investment management in, gosh at least a dozen companies, and truth be told not one really had a tight grasp of or even a good process for managing their major expenditures.

I can’t help but drift into a pirate accent when I maul the pronunciation of CAGR. I’ll try to slip CAGR in during my first ever podcast. Compound annual growth is one of the cornerstone concepts of investing and wealth. I first mentioned it in this post, my worst investment in 2008, but have never explained it.

Benjamin Graham’s Lost Magic Formula and other Checklists.

The ten best Australian business sites for news, data and opinion on Australian companies and the economy.

Over at PazzoMundo I noticed the following comment, which is typical of numerous comments and posts I’ve been reading lately. “This market is exasperating – I’ve been expecting the rally to lose steam for a while now but it seems that it’s quite happy to ignore economic reality”.

In the Intelligent Investor Benjamin Graham said “In the short-run it’s a voting machine, but in the long-run it is a weighing machine.” For some reason most market participants focus on the second part of that statement, they concentrate on the weighing maching.

To buy low you should be buying now.

Today I give thanks to my dad. When several people told me what I wanted to do was impossible and I was too late, it was my dad’s voice reverberating in my mind which drowned out their negativity. My dad wise saying, “there is no such thing as can’t” , was my life jacket in the sea of negativity which four authorative people cast me adrift in.