Five Things to Ignore on the Way to Becoming a Successful Investor

1. Hot Tips.  I’ve found (and Twitter is littered with them) that most hot tips are designed to enrich the person touting them and are rarely researched or present good long-term investments. 
2. Selling when a company is doing well.  Your goal as an investor is to reinvest and compound your profits, not enrich a broker.  If you’ve done your homework, keep on investing. The stock will split and you can buy more shares.  Of course, if your plan is to sell at a certain price point, then follow your plan to the letter!
3. Taking risks.  We all take risks crossing the street, driving to work, getting in and out of the bathtub, eating greasy foods.  The stock market is the least-risky investment vehicle long term.  I’m emphasizing “long term” here because right now, the world has a short-sighted field of view. 
4. Professional advice.  While a heart surgeon can reasonably predict how a bypass operation will go and a lawyer can reasonably predict how an estate plan will avoid taxes, no “professional” is good at predicting or timing the stock market.  Even the best ones fumble from time to time.  If you learn about the various investment vehicles out there, and do what you feel works for you, you will be guided by facts, not promises.
5. You don’t know anything about, so you won’t learn.  I’m always amazed at people’s capacity for convincing themselves they can’t learn.  But many of us have been brainwashed to believe this horrible lie.  We can learn at any age at any time at very little cost.  The information is free and the knowledge is priceless.