Baillieu Valuation of VEC, page-153

"All good mate just curious how one gets a red heart."

I think he got a red heart because he can get his head around numbers (and facts) and can distil those numbers (and facts) into meaningful and useful commentary that he generally delivers in a fairly unbiased way. Many people just don't have the numeracy and analytical skills that @binwood has or just go around making stuff up to suit their agendas on HC. My guess is that he might have run into trouble last year because he weighted his portfolio too far towards the spec end of the market but he has mentioned before that he is relatively young so probably a suitable strategy if you are trying to build your portfolio fast.

The problem is that even the most successful high risk fund managers can only hope to consistently have year on year returns of about 20% -30% and even there they are playing the high stakes game. If anyone thinks they can do better than this they just don't understand markets or the financial system. Of course there are examples of some people (even novices) who take an "all in" approach and make very big returns on the stock market but those people are the extreme outliers in any probabilistic sense (lucky in layman's langauge). These lucky people are market participants but not represenative of the market. Most of the trillions and trillions of dollars flushing around the equity and money markets are earning very low yields and some of these trillions are still earning negative yield. The investment which is considered the safest "market" investment world-wide (ie the "risk free" benchmark) is money that big banks put into the US Federal reserve's bank accounts when they accumulate excess reserves (ie money not in demand by the credit market). This is "pure" money with no counter party risk and it currently yields about 2.4%. That is the reality of the financial system at present and the benchmark for all investors no matter what they invest in.

Many younger people or novice investors come to the stock market to punt like on a horse race or like sports betting for one-off gains but by doing this they are using the stock market in the wrong way. The stockmarket is not a horse race that starts and ends and has a "result", it's a continuous weighing machine that when working properly should distribute capital to the best opportunities. The weighing machine from time to time get's out of calibration and I think it is a long way out of calibration at the moment so soon will need a reset. That is another thing novice investors should be cautious about as the winning stocks take a long time to poke their heads above water but when the reset eventually happens all stock prices get hammered back down together.Esh