IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN

It's that time again, although you usually see articles like this throughout the year.

It's time to lay down some thoughts about 2015 and how to increase your chances to be successful in the land of investments where most often it takes two eyes rather than one to remove the veil.

Here's our list.

1.  Do your homework.

2.  Look for the unseen, not the seen.

3.  Related to #2, understand what everyone knows is usually not much help at best and incorrect at worst. Former President Dwight Eisenhower once noted: "If everyone is thinking the same thing, nobody is thinking."

4.  In boxing it's the one you don't see that does the damage or hurts the most. In case you don't recognize it, that's a metaphor for asking yourself what have I not looked for or not thought about that could go wrong?

5.  Neophyte investors--usually like young marriages--buy with only one direction in mind--up. The high divorce rate in general tells those who pay attention other directions are possible.

In one of my previous incarnations I was working my usual ER shift when a big, strapping ex-professional pro football lineman rolled in late one night with a badly swollen, painful red hot great toe infection, the kind that usually ends up getting I&D,

He seemed in a lot of pain as he hobbled over to a gurney and pulled his house slipper off.

"What's your pain level on a scale of 1-10 ?"

"10, man. It's a 10," he shot back without the slightest hesitation.

"That's pretty high," I offered in one of my more empathetic tones.

"Naw, this ain't nothing, doc. I've been through some real pain."

"Such as, "I probed , alluding to his pro football days.

"Naw, that ain't nothing either, doc. I was married for 10 years, man!"

Since at that very time I was going through a painful split with my then live-in girlfriend, I recognized a kindred spirit, infected toe or otherwise.

It was what William Butler Yeats, in his longtime unrequited love for Maude Gonne warned about, the dangers of wooing spirits not kindred of your own soul. It's the same in the market: Do your homework.

Understand what you're getting into and have a ready, viable exit plan before you execute the trade.

I opened his toe, sutured a drain in, put him on an antibiotic and some painkillers while we swapped stories through what was a slower than usual night absent the routine overdoes, MIs, car wrecks and gunshot victims.

6.  Extrapolation, though we all do it, is just another version of taking too much for granted. There's an old joke about the alcoholic who said: " For years his dog never bit him until one night he came home sober." Things change.

Extrapolation in the market is buying or staying with last year's hot sectors, expecting more of the same.

6.  Here's another one: A+B = C. That may apply to numbers but not when A is Alice, B is Bob and C is Charles. Behind the market are millions of individual consciousnesses. Basic market psychology, especially for the general population, is it's more comfortable to buy when asset prices are rising.

Yet some of history's most notable investors like Buffett and the late Sir John Templeton talked about looking for what Templeton called "maximum pessimism."

7.   Related to the above is one of life's biggest myths, one that bureaucrats, politicians and even psychologists never seem to get, that people behave rationally. If you believe that, you've never driven a car in Southern California. And when it comes to investors you can take that to the 10th power.

If you think all these investors the past few years chasing yields, any and practically all yields despite the risk, will turn out unblemished, you've never seen or suffered a bad case of acne.

8.  It's not supposed to be easy. One of the big stories of 2014 is how indexers outperformed the alpha-added crowd. But there was a time not so long ago when the indexers didn't do too well versus the money management boys and girls.

Indexing is the one-size-fits-all trap, the same trap that money management offers when it's leading the parade. And it will again. It's a close relative to the belief that people behave rationally most of the time as they well might. But check your newspaper or click on the Internet or television and tell me how much irrational behavior you see every day.

9.  Learn that just because you know something it doesn't mean everyone else does. And the law of reversibility applies here also.

10. When I was a young guy coming up my dear old mother gave me a simple two part piece of advice that proved quite effective avoiding unwanted trouble. "Take a glass of water before you go to bed and nothing after. Either that or wear protection."

If you're going to play around the markets, don't forget to bring along your own protection. A healthy dose of skepticism not cynicism is a good start.

11. And this one is related to all the others, but it can't be stressed enough--Do your homework.