"Participate in bullish market trends and avoid the major losing market trends," says Nick Atkeson. "If you can execute on this simple idea, you should be a very successful investor."
Well, yeah. That's the whole objective of investing. It's the "how" that matters, and Atkeson doesn't let that slide. The founding partner of San Francisco-based Delta Investment Management wrote the book on it (literally) with Delta co-founder Andrew Houghton, titled "Win by Not Losing: A Disciplined Approach to Building and Protecting Your Wealth in the Stock Market By Managing Your Risk."
So how is it done?
Tactical investing, something Delta knows quite a bit about, as it's the firm's specialty.
"There are variations of the definition of tactical investing," Atkeson explains. "For our purposes, it's an active management portfolio strategy that rebalances a percentage of assets held in different categories in order to take advantage of market pricing discrepancies so we can avoid losses."
Atkeson references Warren Buffett's first rule of investing, "don't lose money," before adding Buffett's second rule of investing, "don't forget rule No. 1."