Being a Los Angeleno (for almost 14 years now), I thought it would be fun and instructive to do something a little different for this year-end letter and show how the principles and strategies of dealing with the infamous L.A. traffic are directly applicable to investing, and specifically how we employed some of these techniques in navigating the market opportunities of 2010.

Although my commute to work is mercifully short (6 miles to be exact), being a driver in Los Angeles nevertheless manages to test the limits of my patience on a daily basis. In a city where moving 2 miles on Wilshire Boulevard can take an hour and where an extra millisecond of delay when the light turns green will invite an almost instantaneous cacophony of honks behind you, I no longer wonder about the motivations of so-called “road rage.”

Here are some techniques for dealing with the dog-eat-dog world of L.A. driving, the end-goal being to get you to your destination in one piece and in the shortest amount of time possible. Some of the techniques are more “offensive,” whereas some are “defensive,” but they all are helpful in getting you from point A to point B, both literally and financially.