Well Spekulatius, you saw fit to respond to my comment in 21688 that "HANS - up 20% - what's the big deal ?". By that I assumed you didn't think that a 20% increase in a stock's price in less than a month was much of an achievement. And therefore, by implication, your investment strategy was of such a calibre that your average returns were far in excess of that figure.
I'm therefore somewhat surprised to read that you are content to only beat the Indices by a couple of percent per year. You also stated that "your TWIN is up almost 20% as well". Well, I think the big difference here is that HANS achieved its 20% gain in 25 days, whereas TWIN took 3 months to get from a recent low of $20 to its current $25. In addition, TWIN fell from a high of $28 to that low in mid-April.
If we want to compare "apples with apples", we can look at HANS's unbroken rise from $10 in Jan.'04 to its current $107.50. That's a rise of 970%, or an average of 53%/month !
(Since my message 21688, a few days ago, HANS's price has gone up another 12%). What Peter Lynch would call a "10 bagger". The best that TWIN could achieve was a rise from $19 in Jan.'04 to a high of $28.20 in Feb.'05. That's 48% in 11 months, or about 4.5%/month.
In my opinion, the difference in price performance between these two companies can be found in the Quality of their Financial Fundamentals, which is what attracted me to HANS in the first place.
Personally I believe that any investor, armed with a sensible strategy based on understanding and analysing a company's Financial Statements, and a few things besides, can certainly beat any stock market Index.
If your strategy is only just managing to beat the Indices, maybe you should contact me and we can discuss an Investment Strategy that would regularly beat the Indices.
The sad fact about professional Fund Managers and the like, is that they are rarely able to consistently beat a Market Index, which, after all, is more or less just the "average" of a group of stocks.
The aspect about why I "hang out on Message Boards", is, I believe, my own business and certainly doesn't warrant further discussion. I'm sure there are other contributors to this Board who obtain excellent returns with their stock market investments, but that doesn't stop them from entering into constructive discussion and debate on the subject of Value Investing. |
