The beginners struggle

[SBQ]

In the real world away from academic hypotheses and monotonous uniformed posts there are those who long term outperform the market and those who underperform it and all those in between.

To discover if you can be a star then you have to give it go and put some effort in.
To give up before you start is not how you succeed.

As Peter Lynch once said. "You do not outperform the index by buying the index".

And for the benefit of SBQ the EPS figure is always at the end of the statement of P&L/Comprehensive Income which is usually the first item in the Financial Statements which is often in refered to in an index near the front of the report.

No it's not. My aunt receives annual reports from her NZ holdings and on odd occasion, the 1st thing I look at is EPS. I remember decades ago with The Warehouse Group pushing their dividend policy as front page achievement in their glossy annual reports. Only to be disgusted that EPS was not a figure to be found - my aunt said you have to calculate that. So no I strong disagree. What is a fact is NZ's obsession of dividend payment on shares and that's why we have brokers like MacQuires NZ pushing the same rubbish and NZ listed companies having the same expectation to paying dividends.

As a rebuttal for Peter Lynch, a reference to Warren Buffet's spew again those (active fund managers, individuals investors actively trading, the whole shebang!): Who's the better investor Peter Lynch or Warren Buffet? you decide...

https://realbusiness.co.uk/warren-bu...stment-skills/

and for those that don't care to click on the link, i'll post most of it here:

“It seems so elementary,” he said, “but people just can’t believe that because they have billions of dollars to invest that they can’t go out and hire somebody who will do better than average. I hear from them all the time. Supposedly sophisticated people, generally richer people, hire consultants, and no consultant in the world is going to tell you ‘just buy an S&P index fund and sit for the next 50 years.’ You don’t get to be a consultant that way. And you certainly don’t get an annual fee that way.

“So the consultant has every motivation in the world to tell you, ‘this year I think we should concentrate more on international stocks,’ or ‘this manager is particularly good on the short side.’ So they come in and talk for hours, you pay them a large fee and they always suggest something other than just sitting on your rear end and participating in business without cost. Those consultants then in turn recommend other people who charge fees, which cumulatively eats up capital like crazy.

“I’ve talked to huge pension funds, and I’ve taken them through the math, and when I leave, they go out and hire a bunch of consultants and pay them a lot of money,” he said. “It’s just unbelievable, and the consultants always change their recommendations a little bit from year to year. They can’t change them 100 per cent because then it would look like they didn’t know what they were doing the year before. So they tweak them from year to year and they come in and they have lots of charts and PowerPoint presentations and they recommend people who are in turn going to charge a lot of money and the flow of money from the ‘hyperactive’ to what I call the ‘helpers’ is dramatic.”


Buffett also didn’t hide his resentment for their lack of abilities when it comes to investing.

“There’s been far, far, far more money made by people in Wall Street through salesmanship abilities than through investment abilities,” he said. “There are a few people out there that are going to have an outstanding investment record. But very few of them. And the people you pay to help identify them don’t know how to identify them. They do know how to sell you.”

Now are you trying to tell me that there exists some NZ actively managed fund that will outperform what Buffet has claimed? Get real, 1st let's start with their true % returns on their prospectus working through the math and taxation directly to the individual. They don't. There's no need; he won the Protégé Partners bet.

As for some checklist? What kind of check list do active fund managers use when they look to buy or sell stocks? Complete utter nonsense and to the novice investor, the best the NZ gov't does is tell them to go into Kiwi Saver, for which, who is really getting rich?