MonkeyK's Expert Dogs

How do I invest?

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The profile thingy doesn't give me enought space to explain myself and, worse yet, doesn't tell me that it doesn't give me enough space, so perhaps an introductory blog entry will improve things.

My investment strategy is to read what the "experts" suggest, pick the storys that sound reasonable to start with, weed out anything glaringly wrong (like buying a stock when insiders have recently sold it for less), and then try to buy at a discount from what the "experts" paid. Essentially, I am buying their "worst" picks, but those that they still seem to have confidence in. Or maybe I am buying the picks for which the bottom has already fallen out. I admit that this is probably not a great strategy, but, as an amatuer, it's the only thing that makes sense to me so far.

Performance-wise it seems to mostly work. Sample runs have me up around 20% in six months.

The problems with what I am doing are:

1) The lower price could be a signal that others already know that the "expert" is dead wrong
2) While I have a buying criteria of "less than the expert paid", I have no idea what to set for a selling price. I tend to sell if the price jumps by more than 10% in a day without any news.
3) I have no idea how much risk to take in any one position.
4) I am poor at identifying glaringly wrong things, I bought into the hype of BBC both in a the sample run described above and in my personal account and was clobbered for it.
5) I am overly swayed by terms that I do not know how to evaluate. Terms like "good management", "solid fundamentals", and "reactions are overblown"
6) I have gut level trusts of "experts". I have a lot of faith in the analysis of experts whose stories make sense to me more often than not. However I have never really analyzed their performance other than ranking in Strategy Labs.

I am welcome to any comment on how to address my shortcomings as an investor.