My investment career up ‘til this point had been full of disappointments and hypocrisy, I read and wrote about the virtue of doing your own work and investing, not speculating; but all this time I borrowed ideas from others and rarely did the amount of work necessary to justify taking a position. This had all started to change after I stopped working as much and was able to plow all the excess time into investing, to great result (unfortunately the result for my physique was the opposite).

Ironically, the leftovers in my portfolio from my earlier ‘borrowing,’ stage (AXP, SHLD and TLF) were the stocks that were consistently down and out for me and the stocks I did the most work on (OSTK, NFLX, WEST, KSWS, various special situations and SNS at times) were the best performers in my portfolio.

My approach at the time was as dogmatically ‘value,’ as it comes, I did strictly bottom-up analysis, and tried to project the future valuations of individual businesses. This did very well for the first half of 2008:

· Netflix ( ) – I found this idea reading Matt Richey’s VIC write-ups, did my research and scuttlebutt and bought it in August of 2007 at about $17 per share, in June 2008 I bought more shares at $31 and it went as high as $32 during the month.

· Overstock.com ( ) – This was the first company I really dug down into and went against the crowd in buying. I tried to look at it in a different way from all the other analysts I read who couldn’t seem to get over Patrick Byrne’s past antics. I saw an amazingly efficient business model that could produce huge returns when it made a profit. I originally purchased in August of 2006 and averaged down at $18 in December 2007 and $10 in March 2008. The stock was hugely volatile and went over $28 per share during June – almost becoming my first triple.

· K-Swiss ( ) – K-Swiss is easily the biggest disappointment of my investment career, I wrote a 12 page analysis of it as early as July 2005, and bought it five different times from October ’04 to April ’08. My average buy price in it was about $21; it was around $17 in June 2008. Here are my thoughts on K-Swiss: My initial analysis was theoretically correct, but my premises were not, I vastly overrated management’s ability to turn the company around and keep its growth up - I believe this is a result of an attachment I felt to the company, I still only wear K-Swiss shoes and the investment was always my pick, I found it, I analyzed it, I listened to every conference call - I knew it in and out, but I did not know my own psychology, unfortunately.

· Western Sizzlin’ (WEST) & Steak - ‘N- Shake ( ) – I had and still have two great passions with investing learning about amazing investors who find and unlock value on a regular basis and special situations, I had both of these with Western Sizzlin’. I bought in June 2007 after reading about Biglari’s former moves in taking over Western Sizzlin’ and then Friendly’s and about the returns he had with both. I did some calculations and found WEST was roughly only priced at the value of the restaurant business at Western Sizzlin’ and the Cash on its books – nothing was assigned the value creation Biglari had shown in the past. Steak- ‘N – Shake was Biglari’s newest activist play, the business was great and the cash flow should have been excellent, but SNS’ management spent way too much on new locations instead of allowing the good returns to flow, Biglari would unlock this value. I still believe these two investments would be way up today had the whole market not exploded. I was up about 20% on my positions throughout June.

My portfolio was relatively focused; I only had eight total positions, with Netflix only occupying 4% of the portfolio during June after I sold half of it and Overstock routinely rising above a fourth or more of the portfolio. This concentration combined with some actually good picks and a general market rise put my portfolio up 40% for the year, the losses from five frivolous years of investing into more than $10,000, on just over $8,800 of investment. I took the confidence gained from this experience and transformed it into a part-time job with the Motley Fool.

The Motley Fool is where I learned the majority of my investment knowledge at the time. For a period of about three years I read many message boards every day, a couple newsletters every month and posted all my ideas for others to analyze. For the summer in between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I had a job as a ‘Community-Analyst, where I followed 4 of the selections from their ‘Inside Value,’ newsletter on the discussion boards (the companies I followed were: McGraw-Hill, Gap, Rent-a-Center and Corporate Executive Exchange Board). To start I put each company through my checklist, then posted on the quarterly results during the summer, answered questions on the discussion boards of these companies and generally tried to help with questions on other boards where I was knowledgeable.