- by focusing on great value, the proverbial dollar for 50 cents. This is kind of hard work, you have to put in the time, which means you have to be genuinely interested in "business" or you won't keep it up.
- by not doing anything unless you find a dollar for 50 cents. Wall Street has to play all the time, you don't.
- by holding a sufficiently long time. Of course you can't wait indefinitely; sometimes just taking a loss e.g. if you find something else which is great value.
- by stomaching volatility
- by embracing volatility and, when you can, making sweet love to it
- by keeping it simple. Your only "hedge" can be just trying to pay 50 cents for a dollar. Having some crude heuristics for timing and taking profits.
- by assuming every management team and big shareholder is constantly trying to screw you over. Tolerating no bullshit. Trying to avoid being around morally handicapped people (this applies to any part of life imho).
- most relevant to the original article: by not tolerating anybody else's opinion (which implies investing your own money and only your own money, meaning you can. not. get. fired. Ever. And if you screw up, you'll learn.)
- by avoiding tip givers and tip takers. Group think is a killer. But of course, enjoying talking about general conditions. (My honest, very personal take on current group think: "you can't go wrong with low cost index investing". Which is not a bad idea in itself, until everyone starts doing it and they flood the market with indices and dubiously structured trackers.)
- once again, by not feeling you have to be part of everything which goes up.
- by having a lack of stress (you will doubt a lot, get screwed by management and big shareholders and have plenty of losers and lumpy payoffs)
- by doing this for a very long time (as in: the 80s were much easier than the 201xs, maybe just because fewer people were watching. And back then they were sometimes hiding profits instead of faking them. Today is the hardest time ever, if I find something superficially good, probably something is wrong with it. Personally I have very little self confidence today.)
- being small, which means you can look in places the big guys who have to move around billions can't look
- staying on the "easy side" of the basic math of loss vs profit. I personally would never short or sell optionality or stuff like that. Willing to take a gentle thrashing but never ruin.
And necessarily:
- by avoiding the show stoppers (start playing bridge, take a journey around the world, get divorced, disease, death)
Everything else is bullshit. Or at least part of more complex or shorter term or "trading" strategies with which amateurs can of course never do great. Volatility is not risk. Concentration is not necessarily risky.
Edit: poured out some random thoughts and tried to clean it up later. Sorry for the mess.