We struggle with how bad of a grade to give ourselves for 2011 because in some ways it’s too early to tell. Yes, many of our stocks took beatings during the year, but only time will tell whether we were wrong or just early. We think in most cases the latter, given that we still own meaningful positions in 8 of our 10 (and 15 of our 20) biggest losers on the longside in 2011. If even a handful of these stocks perform like we think they will in the next 1-3 years, we won’t look as dumb as we do today– and thus we might give ourselves a C for 2011. If these stocks don’t recover then we deserve a D. Why not an F? Because an F is reserved for blowing up- and we didn’t…We feel badly about our recent performance and obviously wish we’d done many things differently, but we are not at all discouraged, as we’ve been through this before. If you look at our performance table at the beginning of this letter, you will see that we’ve lost more money, much faster, on two other occasions: we were down 27.4% in eight months from June 2002 – January 2003, and down 32.8% in five months from October 2008 – February 2009. In both of these cases, by playing a strong hand and buying more of our favorite stocks as they plunged, we made back all of the losses (and then some) remarkably quickly: in only nine months in 2002-03 and a mere seven months in 2008-09. We could not be more confident that we will rebound strongly from our latest losses [-24.9 percent for 2011] as well. Continue reading »