Addi:
As I have pointed out already, Jock has cherry-picked the winners. For every winner in his list, one could point out a loser that would, at some point or the other, have been viewed as the better of the two.
Hindsight is 20/20 and one can always generate astounding returns by picking only the winners. Investment newsletters do this on a routine basis -- they simply sweep their losing picks under the carpet and come up with all those sensationalistic "How to get 15000% on your investment in 10 years!!!!" ads. <G>
Sure, people will always shave and therefore Gillette will never go out of business. In fact as the population grows I expect for Gillette to grow with it. This is 2*2=4 and does not take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
It is not as simple as that. As the population grows, so does the number of passengers that fly. And yet, airline stocks have proven to be remarkably dull investments, at best. In fact, I have read that if you take the sum total of all investments made in the airline industry from the time that Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the airplane, the net result is a loss! This is something that investors rushing to put their money in the internet should be aware of. The internet may be wildly successful, but investing in it might well be a losing proportion to the vast majority of people. |
