Reply #18: Possibly. But you might just be a lucky investor. [View All]

[Common Sense Party]

Getting 10% in a year when the market did better than that doesn't mean you're a bad investor. It simply means the companies you picked didn't have as great a year as the overall market. But getting 10% is still better than some people did--some stock picks lost money. So maybe you got lucky.

But 12 months means nothing.

What will be really telling is how your picks do over the next 5 to 10 years, assuming you hold them that long. If you're just trading stocks short-term, you won't do nearly as well as the market over the next 5 to 10 years. No one has, and no one can be consistently right, time and time again, to a much better degree than the general market.