Losing other people’s money isn’t as much fun as it sounds. We either bought, or gave directions to buy shares of CSCO on December 3rd, 2010 at $19.09 to folks who trust us enough to let us make some investing decisions for them; they’ve now lost 1.89% on their investment in just about two months. We have no intentions of selling; on Monday we'll be buying for their accounts.
Up until last Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 these folks were making about 15% on the same investment, since it had only been about two months, as we just pointed out, we were feeling pretty smart, and getting ready to do some bragging about our track record, when Thursday rolled around. Let’s just say it was “a day that will live in infamy” (hopefully nobody has used that line already).
Since we do a great deal of explaining how we make money for others, we thought this would be a good chance, actually the first, to explain how we also lose it.
We were waiting for at least a 7% price jump when we published our article Hard Drives, Floods, Monasteries and Investment Returns on Dec. 2nd , 2011 – good thing we weren’t holding our breath. We thought the article looked pretty smart, not only because the WDC investment had already returned 30.2% to investors by the time we were able to publish, but also because we had this really crazy $67 dollar price target on the stock (way higher than any other analyst at the time) – we thought people would listen.
The following is a copy of email correspondence we recently had with a friend and in the same spirit as our post "
On December 22nd, 2011 we began purchasing shares of 
On December 22nd, 2010 we published our article “
We were going to title this article “We’re so smart”, but we thought that there was at least a small possibility that readers would fail to appreciate the depth of our humility if we did that, so we went with the second most obvious title we could think of. Besides after SeekingAlpha’s editors picked up our article 
Exactly one year ago, on September 28th, 2010 we purchased shares of Sanderson Farms for investors. Two days later we published our opinion on 
The following is provided as related material the article "
In the spirit of 
On August 11th, 2010 we acquired shares of Western Digital Corp. for others accounts at $24.15 a share in the midst of tremendous pessimism about the storage industry. On September 17th, 2010 we outlined a few simple views that brought about this decision and published our article 
This article is a follow up on our February 12th, 2011 article: “
This article is a follow up on “
Investment and Speculation are two very distinct activities. Speculators believe they can see into the future, and more particularly, believe they have some sense of future security prices. Investors accept that they do not have any special foresight, and instead focus on an entirely different set of criteria.