We've been talking a great deal about credit and savings the last few days, but wealth creation is also about investing money, too. To that end, I've been leafing through mutual fund manager Fred Kobrick's new book “The Big Money: Seven Steps to Picking Great Stocks and Finding Financial Security” and it's a good read. Kobrick, whose Kobrick Capital Fund was designated as USA Today's “Fund of the Year” two-years in a row in 1998 and 1999, says that investors' Achilles heel is impatience. “Patience is not only a virtue, it's a necessity,” says Kobrick. “All too often impatience costs investors dearly, because they might have only 'intellectual patience'-- they know what to do but just can't fight their emotions and the market swings. If investors do not have buy/sell disciplines or benchmarks or a compass, their emotions and intellectual patience will continually be tested by the volatility in the market,” says Kobrick. In his book, Kobrick says there are five things every investor needs to know: 1) Know what a company plans to do to grow and how it plans to accomplish that so you can track it. This should be clearly stated in its business model, which for good companies, should be easy to find on their web sites, in their annual reports, and in other obvious places. 2) Know that when a company's stock is selling far above or below its trend line it is time to check on a possible buy or sell. Price-earnings ratios are only one way. Price to sales, and price to book value are nice additions. 3) Know if a company has a world-class opportunity in an industry that is going to be growing enormously. The early days of biotechnology, electronics retailing, personal computers, and athletic footwear are a few examples. 4) Know that world-class opportunity means things like differentiation, business model and management. 5) Know that analysis, knowledge and common sense have to replace emotion when you make decisions. A sure-fire path to investment failure? Kobrick covers that, too: � Feeling scared when a stock is going down, so you sell. � Feeling that when a stock is going up rapidly in price, the press loves it, you must own it and hold it. � Not knowing what opportunities a company wants to take advantage of over the next 3-5 years. � Timing the market, and not having any sense of how long you should hold the stock. All good points -- and all worth remembering when you invest your hard-earned money in the stock market.