Repeat After Me - Do Not Chase Performance

I'm serious - one of the biggest mistakes you can always make is to chase performance. As this article in Bloomberg points out - the impulse to follow trends rather than anticipate them is a hard one to ignore. After all, from childhood, people learn to repeat the actions that worked the last time. That skill serves them well in many fields of endeavor. But not investing, where it leads to buying high and selling low -- an error that looks as common today as ever before. To make the biggest returns, you have to often look outside the box. That is why I was so bullish on Japan earlier this year when it was almost suicidal to even say you were bullish on their economy.