Nevandal wrote:
Fun Fact: My trading account has grown in 1 month more than most top performing mutual funds do in a year.
Oh, you're throwing out fun facts now? Then how about this ...
The CAGR on U.S. Treasury Bonds over the last 10 years, that is, between 11 September 2001 and 11 September 2011 was a little over %22.4 in actual payout despite horrible yields. I'm sure you did not know that ... If, for instance, you had $1000000 to invest on 11 September 2011, and you did something pretty simple and sane, called a "Coward's Portfolio", you'd have beaten Warren Buffett's return on the decade by almost 10%. But, that's information anyone can get it ...
So, we'll look at your claim: "My trading account has grown in 1 month more than most top performing mutual funds do in a year". I'm going to be nice to you and assume you're basing this claim on percentages. You aren't moving billions of dollars; you don't have billions of dollars in principal to re-leverage against fading sectors, bearish behavior, and the general apathy of the stock market. Keeping that in mind, most of the 10 best mutual-funds you know about or will find easily enough on the web are hovering around 17%. That's really not a lot, especially considering you're principal, if I'm kind, is between $10,000 and $99,999. Best case scenario, you beat $17,000 in month; however, since you gave us all sorts of unnecessary information, you're better than 17% returns are less than $10,000. People use percentages because they don't understand big numbers, so let me give you a little perspective ...
Warren Buffett's net worth is generally considered north of $50 billion dollars. That's 50000 million dollar groups; or, because that somehow doesn't seem tangible enough to me; Warren Buffett could give everyone at the next Super Bowl a million dollars (about 45,000 people expected to attend) and still have 10% of his current net worth.
I know, I know ... you're not Warren Buffett; you're not the "Wizard of Omaha." Well, here's the scary thing: Warren Buffett isn't a statistical anomaly; Warren Buffett did not make his money taking risks and going against the odds. There are more statisticians at Berkshire Hathaway than there are economists; there are more statisticians than there are finance consultants and accountants. Wrangling the double entry ledger for a multi-billion dollar hedge fund is child's play compared to the petaflops of processing power Berkshire Hathaway dedicates a year to statistical analysis. The guys managing the mutual funds you're disparaging do incredible things based on very established math, a little bit of insight, and a general understanding that the stock market is inherently non-deterministic; inasmuch as you think you can beat the system, I'm here to tell you that the system you're trying to beat doesn't play by any rules you can recognize. You haven't and won't abstract the system far enough to understand that for every Warren Buffet, there are roughly 188,000 investors in the U.S. stock market that lose money on every trade ... that lose money on EVERY trade.
Mutual funds work a lot like health insurance pools: they aggregate capital and distribute risk; mutual managers and their teams of economists, statisticians, and finance theorists do an incredible job of finding consistent, long term profits in an insanely hazardous game of chance. These companies produce real profits and monetary growth by knowing enough about what's going on they can mitigate the risk to normal investors. But, you think you're smarter than that ... you think, just because you have a basic understanding of stop-loss measures and other investment protection vehicles that you're ok. Nothing could be further from the truth ...
Like I said, this is going to be a fun lesson in stochasticity. You might want to look that word up.
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