I read an article and read a book "The Most Important Thing in Investment": Listen to the master and don't let your investment get hurt.

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As the saying goes, “If you want to do your job well, you must first sharpen your tools.” Even in the matter of investment, you should first establish prior knowledge.

In a lecture I attended a while ago, someone recommended “[The Most Important Thing in Investment](https://www.books.com.tw/exep/assp.php/vista/products/0010744933?utm_source=vist a&utm_medium=ap-books&utm_content=recommend&utm_campaign=ap-201906)”. Just seeing the book printed on the cover as “a book that has been read twice by Warren Buffett”, I decided to check it out!

The author [Howard Marks] (https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/howard-marks-memos) is the chairman and co-founder of Oak Tree Capital Management Company, and is also an investment guru as famous as Buffett. Under the premise that the author’s reputation is already so prominent, this book also invites four investment industry experts and professors to participate in the commentary. It is quite comprehensive and can be called a classic! If you don’t read it, wouldn’t you be sorry for this lineup?

So, under the hypnotic mood several times, I finally finished reading this book and excerpted the following 10 points of notes (even though 28 points have been concluded at the end of the book, you still have to take your own notes):

Ten investment key points notes

1. Use the second level of thinking. Under the information known to the media and the public, only by further unique thinking can you have outstanding performance. However, you cannot be different for the sake of being different. You must know why your ideas have a leading position.
2. Focus on value investment rather than technical analysis, and you need to cultivate your judgment; however, no matter how good the asset is, it is a bad investment as long as it is expensive.
3. People tend to underestimate risks, and more stable and progressive tools make people more likely to lose caution, accelerating price increases, lowering expected returns, and creating a higher-risk environment.
4. When the water level is high, you can’t see who is swimming naked? However, most investment results depend on the number of failures. A good investor must be able to control risks, such as analyzing risks, diversifying risks, and preventing occurrences.
5. Most things have cycles, especially due to human participation, collective emotions affect changes and changes, and there is room for manipulation; extreme market behavior provides reversal energy, like a pendulum effect.
6. Be careful of the effects of emotions: greed, fear, forgetting to question, conformity, arrogance, jealousy, taking risks in pursuit of high rewards.
7. You can invest in the opposite direction, but you cannot do it for the sake of being opposite. You must be able to detect the actual value, resist the thinking of the masses, wait patiently for the best opportunity, and confirm the prosperous position; buying assets that are forced to sell has the highest return.
8. Really know how sure you are: People who can admit that they do not fully understand will do their best to invest and insist on defensive investment - including excluding poorly performing targets in the portfolio and avoiding short periods in the market; it is better to win more than to lose less, and being too cautious is just a waste of opportunity costs.
9. Understand where the current market status is in the business cycle. The key to profit lies in positivity, timing and skills.
10. Investment mistakes include “lack of imagination”: the inability to understand the range of possible distributions of outcomes and the knock-on effects of extreme events, “psychological” succumbing to greed, continuing to participate in a market that has been overly pushed up, and missing the opportunity to reverse short in this situation.

Hmm…seems like a cliché, doesn’t it?

Analyze the position of this book from multiple perspectives

I tried to analyze the position of this book from several angles:

1. Yes, the general conclusion is indeed like a cliché, but the author can often put forward detailed explanations under these discussions to make the discussion more three-dimensional and layered.
2. However, the book emphasizes many times the ability to make value judgments. As a reader like me, if I don’t quite believe in my own investment skills, would I want the help of a professional unit? And the author’s company can help you check your investment? So, is this book actually a promotional product that promotes the company’s philosophy?
3. Even though it is still a cliché, why not admit it: the so-called “classics” are “things you know but often forget” and “things the master said”. Keep a good book next to you, and you may be able to calm down when you look at investments and see that the mountain is not the mountain.
4. “Classics” should be immortal. Now that the Taiwan stock market has tens of thousands of points and the future is very treacherous, it is suitable for comparative thinking. If the economic situation really turns around in recent years, there will soon be an opportunity to review.
5. Are the “classics” in the investment world also used to invest in “time”, “professionalism” or even “political operations”? You might as well pick a few cases to think about.
6. Looking back, the title of this book is “[The Most Important Thing in Investing](https://www.books.com.tw/exep/assp.php/vista/products/0010744933?utm_source=vista&utm _medium=ap-books&utm_content=recommend&utm_campaign=ap-201710)”, rather than specifically listing the “most important things” to do in “investment”, the author may point out that in the matter of “investment”, ” The most important thing is (mentality, thinking…)”, so you can invest in those “most important things”.

In life, you should invest in the “most important things”:)

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