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1. Decades of investing and reading. Read the reports and the business papers.
2. Considerable formal education in this area.
3. Doing my own detailed analysis (learn how to spreadsheet). Most analysts are crap, but the odd one is good. Work out who they are and follow them.
4. Have a healthy degree of skepticism and bear in mind most of the journalists in the financial papers have no formal qualifications in financial areas at all.
5. Learn who the dud directors/brokers/CEOs are and stay away from them. (you will be amazed how sucessful this strategy is).
6. Be prepared to swim against the tide from time to time, if you back your own analysis. This swim against a massive outgoing tide on BBI has been a long haul for a lot of us, but is starting to come good. In the end, going with the herd is usually a losing strategy.
7. Analyse bad press and see if it is warranted or not. Can provide some good oppoortunities if you can spot them.
8. Also watch out for 'flavour of the month' stocks in press and with the brokers. Some definite flavour of the month stocks were BNB (et al), Centro, AFG, MacQaurie, ABC and so on. These were all market darlings.
9. Always have a solid portfolio in the background from which to be able to launce speculative investments from. I have a large income portfolio that helps pay the bills, but when I get a good speccie in, when I add some of those gains back into my platform portfolio, it builds you up for the future. An all spec portfolio will get hammered in a market downturn (like now). When those dividend notices come in the mail at the moment they always make good reading.
10. Avoid companies that keep on having to issue more and more shares. A weak capital base usually means losses for long term holders.
11. Work out if a company is cashflow positive or negative and the reasons for this (either way). This is so overlooked by many investors. How many companies have failed recently due to negative cashflow.
12. Avoid "Black box" companies that are too complex to analyse and no-one knows what is really going on. Good examples - Enron, ABC, BNB, Oz.

13. And finally, absolutely critically, do not involve your partner in anything to do with shares. Simply do not tell them what you are up to. The constant nagging is not worth it.

Most partners do not equate shares as wealth. They cannot wear it. They cannot show it off to their friends. They cannot live in a fancy share portfolio. They cannot point out to their friends their wealth in shares. They all think it is funny money and then they get into groups and give the person whose partner has shares (instead of property) the sly look and sneer at them and relate tales about how they once had partners like that and it was all a house of cards and it went to custard and the partner never really owned anything at all and it was all a sham.

And also if you have a large holding that is volatile and goes up and down a lot, you will get no credit if you make a large gain OR when the shares hit their very low point, you get an "it's me or the shares" ultimatum, at which point you sell your shares at the very market low only to watch them leap ahead when you don't own them and then become bitter with that partner. Absolutely guaranteed to happen like this, over and over again. The less they know the better.

When you get a good gain, just take them out for a fancy dinner and a night in the posh hotel and say you had a big dividend that week.