To master investing, all you really need to do is read Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letters. Beginning with his first letter in 1973, and every year since, Buffett has used his annual communication to Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B) shareholders as a way to teach the world how to be successful in the stock market. The letters are written in a way that's easy to understand, yet they contain everything that an aspiring investor needs to know. As Buffett explains, to achieve great long-term investing results, a person doesn't need to be a rocket scientist. "Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ," he says, adding, "Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing." The "urges" that Buffett speaks of are fear and greed, natural instincts that are hardwired into us as human beings. Unfortunately for investors, we tend to feel these two urges at the exact wrong times and can fall victim to them. And make no mistake about it, fear and greed are powerful forces. Greed kicks in when stocks have already had terrific runs and valuations are expensive. Everyone is making money, and we want to join in! Greed is the urge that makes us buy stocks at the worst possible time - after most of the money has already been made. If you're feeling greedy, chances are that it's actually a good time to be selling, not buying. In September 2020, I wrote here about a stock that investors were feeling extremely greedy about. The company was Zoom Video Communications (Nasdaq: ZM), a videoconferencing business that had been a huge beneficiary of the pandemic. With investors greedily buying shares, Zoom's stock was up 700%. I liked Zoom's business. (I still do.) But I didn't like its stock market valuation. At the time, Zoom shares were priced at an absurd price-to-cash flow ratio of 92. It was apparent to me that anyone buying shares of Zoom had succumbed to their greedy urges for a stock that seemed to never stop going up. At that valuation, I believed this was a stock destined to collapse. My recommendation was to immediately sell any shares of Zoom that you owned and take advantage of this gift of a valuation that the market had provided. Since then, my prediction has come to pass... | 
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