If I averaged 9.8% on my stock picks over the last year, am I a good investor?

What is considered "good"?

Tucker

any positive average is good, dont you?

If it's your IRA, you can roll it over free

how do you figure a positive average return?

thats good. and yer beating inflation. so smiles are in order.

and you're beating the snot out of most of the big investment firms

Keep at it!

If your investments averaged 9.8% each and every year you would be doing great. The S&P 500, which is a group of the 500 largest US companies averaged 14% last year. I use the S&P as my benchmark. Last year was better than average for the S&P and for me as well.

and 90% luck.

And the House always wins.

My two bits since you asked:

Passive (index fund) investing beats around 4 out of 5 active professional managers (stock pickers) over the medium haul and the long haul.

Stock picking is fun, but buying a diversified basket of no-load (no commission) low-cost indexed mutual funds has tended to beat even professionals over the long run.

Over the same period as you cite, you would have earned over 14% with an S&P 500 index fund from Vanguard, Dreyfus, Schwab, or another low-cost provider over the same period. You would have earned even more, with less risk, with a balanced portfolio of index funds invested in the domestic stock market, foreign stock markets, REITs, and bonds.

You could have earned more with a set-and-forget target-retirement fund from someone like T Rowe Price, or another low-cost provider.

Recommended reading:

http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/0393062457/sr=8-1/qid=1171945450/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2621619-4967253?ie=UTF8&s=books

and/or

http://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor-Larimore/dp/0471730335/sr=1-2/qid=1171945507/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-2621619-4967253?ie=UTF8&s=books

and/or

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Investors-Tried-True-Triumph/dp/140008198X/sr=8-1/qid=1171945887/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2621619-4967253?ie=UTF8&s=books

Off my soapbox and out of this thread.

I'm investing $10-$30 at a time. :-)

Tucker

when you enroll in an "automatic asset builder" program.

You could open a Roth IRA, pick one of their target retirement funds (say the 2030 fund) or any other fund, and just let it ride. You wouldn't be paying the commissions you're paying now on stock trades, that's for sure. You wouldn't be paying any commission, just the fund's (typically low) annual expense ratio.

http://www.troweprice.com/common/index3/0,3011,lnp%3D10375%26cg%3D720%26pgid%3D8359,00.html

Best to you.

but you have to commit to $50/mo.

Call the number at below link for more info:

http://www.troweprice.com/common/index3/0,3011,lnp%3D10375%26cg%3D720%26pgid%3D8359,00.html

Really, not trying to jump into anybody's investing shit, but a lot of friends have built a big pile this way.

As long as you're not losing money, you're okay.

It tells you that you wouldn't have been better off simply putting the money in an index fund.

Getting 10% in a year when the market did better than that doesn't mean you're a bad investor. It simply means the companies you picked didn't have as great a year as the overall market. But getting 10% is still better than some people did--some stock picks lost money. So maybe you got lucky.

But 12 months means nothing.

What will be really telling is how your picks do over the next 5 to 10 years, assuming you hold them that long. If you're just trading stocks short-term, you won't do nearly as well as the market over the next 5 to 10 years. No one has, and no one can be consistently right, time and time again, to a much better degree than the general market.