Would have made a ton of money if you'd bought gold back in late 1990s and early 2000s........yes I bought it and silver too and a lifetime or two supply of .22 ammo a few years ago.
![[wink]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/002.gif "Wink [wink]")
You have to be really careful playing this game(aka hindsight is 20/20). It's one of the reasons why investment fund returns are standardized. If you can cherry pick the time period, you can get almost any investment to show astonishing returns. The real question is whether a buy and hold strategy would perform well over any time horizon.
If you had bought almost any stock(let's pick Harley Davidson-HOG) in march of 2009 you would have seen 3x-10x returns over the past 5 years and could claim to be a genius, or at least a lot better off than you were. I specifically picked HOG because it was one of my excellent calls - one that I lacked the fortitude to pull the trigger on, but that is another investor weakness.
My story was that there was no way the company would fold given how attached people get to their Harley's, and the shame associated with getting repo'd. The analyst story(it was a deleveraging recession after all) was that mortgage default rates were skyrocketing, and people usually abandon their credit cards and auto loans before they stop paying their mortgages.
You know what? People will stop paying their mortgages before they stop paying for their Harley's, and the pay rate for HDFC never dropped below 91%, evn as mortgage defaults topped 20% and credit card delinquencies went north of 25%. In march of 2009, HOG was under $10, by 2011 it was in the $40's again.
To get rich investing you have to be right when everybody else is wrong, yhave to be right at the right time, and yhave to have the discipline/conviction to stay the course as your expectations play out.
