There is a lot to be said for laziness, especially when it comes to investing. The billionaire Warren Buffett, who’s seen a stock or two in his time, is fond of saying that most small investors are far too active for their own good. He suggests that most of us would do much better if we thought of ourselves as having a lifetime 20-stock punch card. Every time you buy a stock, you would punch out another hole in your card. After your 20th stock purchase, you would be finished. No more stocks. Ever.

Buffett’s punch card suggestion is all about the virtues of doing nothing. Most of us sabotage ourselves with too much trading. We listen to rumors, change our minds, jump in and out of stocks — at just the wrong times. Terrance Odean, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has traced the trading records of thousands of small investors and discovered that nearly all of us tend to buy stocks when they’re expensive (think back to 2006 and 2007) and sell them when they’re cheap (like last year). That, of course, is precisely the wrong way to make money.

Odean’s research suggests that many of us could boost our results simply by resisting the temptation to ditch lacklustre stocks in favor of hotter names. One of his research projects tracked people who sold stocks and then immediately turned around and bought other stocks. These people presumably thought they were dumping losers in favor of winners. But that’s not the way things worked out in practice. The stocks that the investors dumped went on to perform about 3.6 percentage points better over the next two years than the stocks they bought. Assuming that these results are typical, it would seem that most of us could bump up our returns from, say, 5% a year to nearly 9% simply by learning to buy and hold a few quality stocks.

Buffett follows exactly that approach. He has held many of his core holdings — the Washington Post Co., Coca-Cola, American Express and Geico — for decades. “Our favorite holding period is forever,” he avers.

But which stocks today are Buffett-like keepers? In this 10th anniversary issue of MoneySense we thought it would be fun to look ahead and attempt to pick 10 stocks that we think will be great buy-and-hold investments for the decade ahead.

We warn you that this is a dangerous exercise. Fortune magazine attempted a similar story in 2000. Out of the 10 “buy-and-forget” stocks it selected, only one (Genentech) proved to be a winner. Two of Fortune’s picks (Enron and Nortel) went bust. Many others (Broadcom, Nokia and Charles Schwab) are trading at a fraction of their 2000 price. The decade isn’t quite up yet, but it looks as if Fortune’s can’t-miss picks from nine years ago would have lost you about half of your money.

We wanted to avoid a repeat of Fortune’s experience, so we tried to learn a few lessons by observing where that esteemed publication went off the rails. Three observations:

• Fortune’s list of stocks to love was insanely expensive. Sure, 2000 was a giddy time for the stock market, but what were those Fortune writers smoking? The average price-to-earnings ratio of their picks was 100, as compared to a more normal ratio of 15 or so.

• Fortune assumed that current trends would continue pretty much forever, so it picked the current hot sectors and looked for the hottest companies in each of them: Nokia in cell phones, Viacom in broadcasting, Morgan Stanley in investment banking, Oracle in communications software, and so on. It appears that Fortune’s stock pickers never pondered the chance that these sectors might cool off.

• Fortune bet all its money on only four trends: networking, entertainment, the “boomerization” of financial services, and biotech. It did not diversify widely and it ignored the stodgy, old-fashioned sectors, such as banking, retail or consumer goods, that make up most of the economy.