1. When we hear the ultimate bedroom line, “This stock will treble in three months and don’t ask why”, we don’t ask why.

2. We believe all the fiction published in research reports even when they are suffixed with an “E” (estimate).

3. We believe that if an investment house is even discussing a company’s prospects with a positive bias, then it has bought into it.

4. We discuss stock prices when we should be discussing profits; we discuss profits when we should be discussing the commodities that influence them.

5. We willingly buy stock in companies that we wouldn’t buy debentures from.

6. We seldom have a perspective on future profit in the companies that we have invested in. So we buy into companies reporting higher profits ignoring that they could well have run up before the results were announced.

7. When a stock that we have invested in slips, we dismiss it as a technical correction; when it drops more, we say it is a great buying opportunity; after it has sunk, we promise to invoke that dispassionate weapon called “stop loss”—next time!

8. When we see a great counter being overlooked for long, we begin to doubt our wisdom, make a sheepish exit and leave the fortune for someone else to encash.

9. We believe that when the market corrects from 15800 to 13900, it is going down to 11,000 and when it rebounds to 19000, it is headed for 25,000.

10. We are over-researched in buying opportunities but selling expertise…well, our official stance is that we are invested for the long-term, so why bother?

11. We are always buying and selling equities based on someone else’s reference of what is cheap and expensive, seldom our own.

12. We confuse the fact that the smartest investors are more concerned with what is happening inside companies than with is happening in their stock prices.

13. We overlook the fact that investing is 99% strategising and 1% trading.

14. We hope, when it is time to act.

15. We think brokers know.

16. We seldom encash profits to raise the quality of our lives.

17. We encounter some of the biggest multi-baggers in the newspapers under the column ‘research reports’ but flip the page to look at the quotations instead.

18. We buy more stock when the market climbs but flip from the front page to the back page when it melts.

19. We do not thank the person giving us a tip…the tip is not our birthright!

Patherya heads Trisys, an annual reports consultancy. He can be reached at mudar@trisyscom.com