Be A Polite And Patient Investor - It Will Pay Off

Hollywood would have us believe the gung-ho Wolves of Wall Street rule the stockmarket. But the stereotype doesn’t hold up in the real world. In fact, there are eight personality types – and only two succeed

- Marcus Padley

It has always irked me that books with titles like How to make a million dollars in the stock market and Ten things you must know about the stockmarket probably sell more copies than my book. It’s my own fault, Stock Market Secrets by Marcus Padley is hardly exciting by comparison, and, let’s be honest, if they were really “secrets”, well, they’re not anymore.

But the get-rich-quick books do sell, presumably because there are a lot of financially anxious, unrealistic, desperate, and frantic people buying books as a solution to their money problems. But if you think about it, in a sort of Catch 22 for get-rich-quick books, anyone buying that sort of book probably shouldn’t be responsible for money because anxious, unrealistic, desperate, and frantic are hardly the right personality traits for a successful fund manager, and when it comes to investment success personality is everything.

Give 100 people $100,000 each and ask them to invest it on a five-year timeframe and, like the Parable of the Prodigal Son, come back in five years, and I can guarantee that apart from the people with zero who spent it, and those with exactly $100,000 who did nothing, there will be no two investors with exactly the same sum of money, which is odd when you consider that the market conditions were utterly identical for each.