Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The ability to select stocks, manage them over time and know when to sell them is incredibly difficult, even for professional fund managers.
I have never for a minute felt in was my stock picking abilities. I feel that my stock picking abilities aided- I was able to pick out which are the good stocks in the good market, but I have been blessed with a great market.
There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.
Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you're good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.
Great investors need to have the right combination of intuition, business sense and investment talent.
I love picking people. I started Blackstone, and we had no people, and now we have with our portfolio companies about 750,000 people all over the world. Everybody who is at a senior level has ultimately been picked by me.
I believe that great success is possible in any field - from music to mathematics to macro trading.
To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet.
I think in every industry you need to have a lot of talent; you need to have a lot of drive, but you need a little bit of luck.
I think you'll do as well as most professionals. Most professionals don't beat the market. Let's not over-rate my industry. But if you have time, you can be in good mutual funds that have good records.