Jagman,
[From your Motley Fool portfolio:]
Some of the bigger winners, UPL up 364%, MVL up 218%. APPX up 178%. The point is, stock selection based on fundamentals is the "safest" way to build assets over time, unless you are a Brad Kelley.
But the Motley Fool itself describes biotechs having huge gains in the many thousands of percents.
Success is not to be sneered at, especially in a less than glorious market, but I have always felt the Motley Fool gave particularly poor advice for investing in biotechs. Its rules for investing might be best adapted to corporations in profitable businesses.
Warren Buffett is an entirely different investor than the like of Peter Lynch or John Templeton. I don't know exactly what Peter Lynch might have said about low-priced stocks but he believed one should avoid diversification while doing indepth research on stocks of interest and know well what one is buying. His advice goes against the wisdom of the herds of contrarians who always stampede off cliffs together. Very lonely being a conventional thinker I can tell you.
The greatest public venture capital firm of all time was American Research & Development. They had the unusual credo that if they were profiting from more than one of ten investments, they were being overly conservative. In the end they made billions from a $40K investment in one man, Ron Olsen, with nothing more than his ideas for mini-computer.
A variety of approaches to investing can yield success but the best advice of all it seems to me comes from characters as wildly different as Warren Buffett and Jesse Livermore.
"Be lazy," advises Warren Buffett. Jesse Livermore advised that he made more money sitting down than doing something.
Patience is yet a virtue though less highly regarded today than modesty.
Best, Terry
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