5-7 years. Making 20%+ per year is not mythical and many people already do it. Kevin Pathrath, Katherine Wood, Emmet Savage, and Danny Devan are 4 that publicly share their portfolios and outperform. Warren Buffet averaged a little higher, and most of us know about other inspiring public investment gurus William O’Neil, Bill Miller, Richard Drihaus, and Jeff Neff.

I started investing 5 years ago with real money and won virtual investing competitions for the 2 years before that where the goal was to produce the highest portfolio values within a given set of time. I don’t remember how high I placed but I got a pretty ornamental gift certificate which inspired me to continue further. Other investors would read charts like they would tea leaves but my strategy was to find stocks trading below their company valuation with above average growth prospects. These prospects have a lower risk and have a higher potential reward.

At one point in my career, I downloaded the data for all 3000+ stocks into a MySQL DB to learn which metrics mattered the most and which mattered the least... and the results were surprising.

That 20% I quoted is from a stock and ETF retirement account. In a non-retirement account that had also grown quite a lot over the years, I allocated a conservative 20% of my portfolio to call options and that account is up 177% overall this year. But options aren’t something you try until you have years of experience, comfort, and knowledge with stocks.

Finally, I know the theme on HN is to disagree, counter, and dispute whatever the previous comment said but I’d like to receive some support if I’m going to continue posting.