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Don't Own Too Many Names

Jim Cramer

In my years as a hedge fund manager, I spent three hours every day analyzing the mistakes of the day before.

That was my major task, one that I completed before anyone else came into the office, generally between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. I would analyze every losing trade -- you don't need to analyze the winners, they take care of themselves -- and try to figure out how I could have made more money or lost less money.

I was maniacal about it.

And after a couple of years of this, I realized that good performance could be directly linked to having fewer positions.

That's one of the reasons I insist on owning only 25 positions, no matter what, for my Action Alerts PLUS portfolio.

I never will buy a stock without first taking one off. That's a great discipline and one you should adopt, pronto. All the bad money managers I know have hundreds of positions. All the good ones have a few that they know inside out and like on the way down.

That's why I say:

Don't own too many stocks.

I know it can be constraining. For instance, I might like several stocks in the chemicals group, say, DuPont(DD Quote), Dow Chemical(DOW Quote) and Eastman Chemical(EMN Quote). But my discipline leaves room for only one, so I would own the one that I thought was the cheapest and the best.

When I lost the most money as a hedge fund manager, by the way, my "sheets," my position sheets, were as thick as a brick. When I made the most money, my sheets were, well, one sheet of paper, double-spaced. And I ran hundreds of millions of dollars.

Please remember that whether you are a pro or an amateur, you can always have too many positions.

	1.	Pigs Get Slaughtered		2.	It's OK to Pay the Taxes
	3.	Don't Buy All at Once		4.	Buy Damaged Stocks
	5.	Diversify to Control Risk		6.	Do Your Homework
	7.	Don't Panic		8.	Buy Best-of-Breed
	9.	Defend Some Stocks		10.	Don't Bet on Bad Stocks
	11.	Own Fewer Names		12.	Cash Is for Winners
	13.	No Regrets		14.	Expect Corrections
	15.	Know Bonds		16.	Don't Subsidize Losers
	17.	No Room for Hope		18.	Be Flexible
	19.	Quit When Execs Do		20.	Patience Is a Virtue
	21.	Be a TV Critic		22.	When to Wait 30 Days
	23.	Beware the Hype		24.	Explain Your Picks
	25.	Find the Bull Market