“Good stock picking is controlled by good luck; bad stock picking is controlled by bad luck. Luck determines your stock picking ability.”

There is no evidence proving anyone can consistently pick stocks and outperform the market’s return over time. We all get lucky and we all get unlucky, too. Picking individual stocks is a coin flip, you will be right 50% of the time and you will be wrong 50% of the time.

I don’t like those odds. Some people will get lucky a few years in a row; these people attract the press and get labeled stock pickers or great mutual fund managers. But the truth is these people inevitably underperform the market average over any given length of time – history has proven this. The general consensus is that a stock picker or a fund manager needs at least 20 years of performance to remove luck and chance from their return track record before any conclusions can be drawn.