Thoughts from the Frontline

How to be a Top 20% Investor

By John Mauldin

January 23, 2004

Becoming a Top 20% Investor
Investors Behaving Badly
Analyze This: Analysts Are Useless
Tails You Lose, Heads I Win
When will the Bear Market Rally End?

This week we re-visit one of my favorite themes: Why Investors Fail. I am doing the final edits on my book, Bull's Eye Investing, and when I came to the chapters on the psychological hard-wiring we have as humans, which causes us to make the same investment mistakes over and over, it just reminded me how important it is to understand why we do the things we do, and then stop doing them!

There are over 50 pages in the book on these issues, so I am just going to pull out a few points for this week's letter. It also let's me get back to editing the final version, which must be done this weekend, as the book must get to the press soon. It will be out in the bookstores in only a few months. More on that below, but now let's examine a few…

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