According to the Book of Odds, a collection of statistics about everyday life, of the 317 million adults in the US, only one in 2.2 make a New Year’s resolution. Of these, one in 8, or 17.8 million will actually keep it for the year. If you do manage to keep the resolutions, however, you are ten times more likely to change your life. So the odds may be stacked against you but the rewards are high. Here is a shortlist of five investing New Year’s resolutions for you to consider:

1 Steal. Don’t let your ego or pride get in the way. Steal great ideas from great investors. Most investors realise that to be successful you need to have your own point of view and that it often pays to fade the crowd, and be somewhat contrarian. That said, it would seem to me to be rather myopic and vane to ignore the opinions of those who have had an excellent long-term track record picking stocks. If the really smart guys like something it often pays to listen. 13-F filings show what managers bought, sold and held in the most recent quarter. It allows you to get a glimpse of when and what they find attractive. When one looks at these positions, it is also worth considering that these decisions were made in the prior quarter and that the filings typically are submitted about 60 days after the quarter. The position may have been purchased at a lower or higher price but it is impossible to discern exactly when in the quarter and at what price the guru bought the shares. That said, one can quickly note if a stock is actually trading at a lower price than at any time in the quarter and this might offer one an even better price than the guru was willing to buy it at. If you want to build your own screeners or follow some stock gurus I would suggest checking out www.gurufocus.com or www.whalewisdom.com where you can build lists of your favourite managers and “look over their shoulders” as they invest. In fact this strategy has proven to be quite a successful one. According to gurufocus.com, investing in the “Most Broadly Held Portfolio”, which basically tracks the most common stocks held by their list of gurus, has generated returns of 80.04 percent since inception compared to the S&P 500 of 47.87 percent as of January 16, 2014.

2 Become a Follower. Various studies on insider activity show that following heavy insider buying is often a great idea. Insiders are officers, directors and ten percent plus beneficial owners who tend to be intimately engaged with the company. They know a lot more than you or me as outside investors because they see day-to-day figures and operations like sales or product trends. They know in real-time the company’s business prospects, supplier issues or competitor problems. To keep the playing field a little fairer the SEC requires them to report all their share transactions. Selling can be done for numerous reasons and is often not as useful of a gauge to determine unknown aspects but significant buy in the open market by an insider is often a good indicator. It can be sign of confidence if this buy is a substantial value compared to the insider’s salary and/or current holdings. For example, if a director owns 10,000 shares and goes on to make a million dollar purchase of hundreds of thousands of shares it’s likely he/she has confidence in the current price of the stock or its prospects.

3 Become Emotionally Unavailable. In a 2004 study published in The Journal of Portfolio Management, “Self Discipline and Institutional Money Management”, Christophe Faugere, Hany A Shawky and David M Smith — finance professors at the State University of New York at Albany — researched the performance of money managers who oversee pension funds, endowments and high-net-worth accounts. Most institutions work under strict investment guidelines, so these academics were able to analyse performance based on differing approaches to selling stocks. The result? Institutional managers who fared best were those with restrictive rules that did not allow leeway for hanging on to stocks for emotional reasons. The managers who relied on “flexible” sell strategies did far worse. Due to emotional biases such as prospect theory, regret aversion and mental accounting, investors tend to hold onto losers much too long and sell winners more readily. To counter these emotional impediments it’s a good idea to have an emotional stop-loss on your investments. There are many ways to do this but it’s important to set limits on losses for individual positions before they become devastating to your overall portfolio. Remember that a 50 percent loss needs a 100 percent gain just to get back to even.

4 Be a Poor Listener. Time to go on a diet. A news diet. Shut off the TV. Tune out the talk shows and ignore those shocking headlines in the Wall Street Journal. If you are investing based on headlines and news stories you’re likely too late or simply using snap judgments that will haunt you in the long-term. Most news stories are sensationalist and lack any real investment merit. In many cases by the time you actually read about it on page one of the Journal it’s too late anyway. I have to agree with Nassim Taleb: being informed doesn’t necessarily make you better prepared. So treat the news for what it is. Read it, speculate about how stories will end, enjoy it. But be cautious about how much help it will be to you when you go to invest.

5 Put Your Money Away and Forget It. As an investor one advantage you have over many high-powered hedge funds and many professional managers is time arbitrage. You don’t need to meet monthly return targets or even one-year performance minimums. You can invest with the purview of a long-term perspective where you can let great ideas play out over longer periods of time. In 1984 Richard Kirby wrote an article in the Journal of Portfolio Management called “The Coffee Can Portfolio”. It contains many valuable lessons on investing but a major one was that buying and holding works. Corporations do not pay out all earnings in dividends and share repurchases. Great companies can reinvest in the business and grow it over time. Good businesses that are able to reinvest capital at a high rate of return over long periods of time can generate extraordinary profits for patient investors. Kirby’s story outlines how an inherited portfolio revealed how some individual $5,000 investments had grown over $100,000 over ten years, and one position had grown to over $800,000 simply because the investor had ignored all sell recommendations. James Montier said it best: “It appears as if investors have a chronic case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The average holding period for a stock on the New York Stock Exchange is just six months! This has nothing to do with investment, and everything to do with speculation. Having a longer time horizon than these speculators appears to be one of the most enduring edges an investor can possess.” I fear too many people measure stock price performance on a quarterly or annual basis and not business performance.

Nathan Kowalski is chief financial officer of Anchor Investment Management. The views expressed are his own.

Disclaimer: This material is not intended to be relied upon as a forecast, research or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt any investment strategy. The opinions expressed may change as subsequent conditions vary. The information and opinions contained in this material are derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources deemed by the author to be reliable, are not necessarily all-inclusive and are not guaranteed as to accuracy. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. There is no guarantee that any forecasts made will come to pass. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the reader. Investment involves risks. Readers should consult their financial advisers prior to any investment decision. Index performance is shown for illustrative purposes only. You cannot invest directly in an index.