We all have a ‘Special Purpose’

My friend Josh Brown does this amazing think where he asks a group of us in the blogosphere for a quip about something we have learned. Here is 2011’s version:

In 2011 I learned that…

Eli Radke (Trading Habits): when fish show up in a barrel always have ammo.

Patty Edwards (CNBC Fast Money): “extend and pretend” isn’t just for dating in the nursing home anymore.

Leigh Drogen (Estimize): the early stage tech start-up market is definitely in a bubble, why else would anyone give me money to build a tech company?

Rob Holmes (TheStreet.com): Bank of America has the capital and liquidity it needs to run its business. Brian Moynihan told me so!

Erin Geiger-Smith (Reuters): you’re never too big to be (repeatedly) sued. Never let Seacrest convince you to marry an NBA almost-star. When will honeybadger care? Never.

Chris Selland (Terametric): sometimes you’ve just gotta keep going. Actually that’s true all the time.

The Fly (iBankCoin): it is a bad idea to raise prices for a sh*tty movie rental service in a sh*tty economy.

James Altucher (Altucher Confidential): the less I learn, the happier I am.

Cullen Roche (Pragmatic Capitalism): the very best investment is never about finding better people or better companies. It is always about finding ways to make yourself better.

Heidi Moore (Marketplace Radio): the only real truth in finance comes from a subpoena.

Tom Brammar (Premia Capital): for far too many truthiness still trumps rational thought, logic and evidence-based analysis.

Katie Rosman (WSJ): if you don’t want to see it quoted in a newspaper, don’t tweet it.

Robert Sinn (Stock Sage): momentum is a fickle and spiteful mistress.

Jesse (Le Café Américain): lawyers are no longer the most despised profession in America. It’s a race to the bottom between bankers, economists, ratings agencies, and politicians.

Barry Ritholtz (The Big Picture): the Golden Rule remains inviolable: He who has the gold makes the rule.

Steven Russolillo (Dow Jones): phrases such as “kick the can” and “muddle through” need to be erased from the vocabulary of market pundits. They’re about as bad as “green shoots” and “stock-picker’s market.” Let’s get creative in 2012.

The Interloper (Interloping): contrary to myth, the market is proven a terrible predictor of the future every time anything bad happens.

Doug Kass (Seabreeze Partners): how wrong conventional wisdom can consistently be!

Anthony DeRosa (Reuters): I still have a lot to learn.

Dr. Phil Pearlman (Baltimore All-City Lacrosse): intuition and planning are not at odds but more of a dialectic. I trusted my gut while coming to the ballpark well prepared for multiple scenarios which allowed me to take what the market was giving and this paid off.

Tim Knight (Slope of Hope): cash really IS a position and there can exist a market that pisses off bulls and bears alike, as it grinds both of them up into hamburger by switching directions every day.

Charles Rotblut (American Assoc of Individual Investors): no one should fall in love with a stock, because you never know when a CEO will quickly screw up a good DVD rental business.

Jeff Carter (Points and Figures): my dog created more shovel ready projects than Obama and when trading stinks, you have to redefine yourself.

TED (Epicurean Dealmaker): running a blog is like constantly trying to explain a movie plot to clowns who keep trickling in late.

John Waggoner (USA Today): I’d have a lot more Twitter followers if I could just escape from this damn zoo.

Ivaylo Ivanhoff (StockTwits): Europe doesn’t have a solvency problem, it has a crisis of confidence. And no, a good French perfume won’t solve it.

Carl Richards (Behavior Gap): there is a fine line between informed and anxious and most of us have crossed it.

Jason Zweig (WSJ): there’s only one thing harder for investors than learning from other people’s mistakes, and that’s learning from their own. I’ve known this for ages, but not many years were as chockful of reminders of it as 2011 has been.

Jonathan Wald (CNN): no one cares about celebrities anymore. Except the good ones. And a bad tweet can linger longer than a Kardashian Marriage.

David Blair (Crosshairs Trader): the market will do what it wants, when it wants, and how it wants…and does so quite often with or without me.

Mick Weinstein (Covestor): I should appreciate living in a net lender nation with strong bank controls… now where’s our Stanley Fisher for all those other little matters?

Joe and Sal (Themis Trading): we learned how powerful Twitter can be in battling the status quo. Oh.. and also not to touch your eyes if you eat a habanero pepper.

Scott Bell (I heart Wall Street): my family is too important to let the stock market ruin my day. I will forget this at least 10 times next year.

Teri Buhl (DealFlow): the trade pubs will still pay well for solid investigative reporting but it takes a paywall or subscription to fund the journalism

Julian Hebron (The Basis Point): housing finance is like politics: it gets dumber as it gets bigger.

Stephen Weiss (CNBC Fast Money): if the person sitting next on the plane to you asks what you do and then solicits your input on a particular investment, short it – it’s a bubble.

Mike Wilkins (FinTech): a big head often carries a small mind. If you fall into that bigheaded trap, you may as well just walk away.

Lucy Marcus (Harvard Business Review): Boards can run but they can’t hide. (see Olympus, MF Global, NewsCorp, HP, Yahoo, the list goes on…)

Stock Rabbi (Mixtape): they can have their Arab Spring, as long as my people can still keep Jewish Tax Season each April.

Howard Lindzon (StockTwits): I learned from more people than I ever thought possible and that should quadruple in 2012. Social Leverage is intense.

GO read the rest. Great job Josh!