I agree with you up to a point as its harder to achieve massive...

I agree with you up to a point as its harder to achieve massive growth once you are not coming off a such a small base. A lot of people said the same thing about Apple, Amazon and Facebook thinking their meteoric growth was going to plateau a long time ago.

For argument sake lets agree with most of the analysts that there is at least a decade of growth ahead of us. Even with the SP appreciating by 25% yoy to reflect sales growth that would mean a speculative SP as soon as 2025 of $55, a 300% increase over today's SP which in my opinion would be on the low side of what growth is possible. That's the magic of compound growth when you just sit on your original investment.

How many successful trades would someone need to make getting in on this level to match the longs in 2025 ? Factoring in no discount to GCT because of the time frame of such trades and the negative effect when they make a bad call that drags down their averages. The long term holder does not have to allocate all the time and effort and go through all stress that it would entail making plenty of successful trades to try to match the same returns of the LTH.

We are all here to make extra coin, it depends on what your vision of success is. Do you want to make a bit extra so you can supplement your pension in retirement, make enough to not have to worry about a pension in retirement or the third level is to make enough to retire before your time and have enough to give the next generation of your family a big leg up in life. The last one is called the FU achievement level.

From my decades of being in the market I have only seen those who got to the third level achieve it through going long over trading stocks. Even those that have a skill in timing the market have to get a job with a hedge fund or other institution that magnifies those gains by using other peoples money to scale their personal profits but put all the risk and downside with the people that put up that money.

Some people for whatever reason are not capable or in the position of leaving investments aside for such a long period. I can only speak from personal experience. In the last 13 years since I have changed my investment outlook to buy and hold it has surpassed the returns I have made by trading stocks many times over in the preceding 27 years of regularly trading stocks.

PS, @hotjt133 I agree with you that most of us LTH that got in early can attribute that success more so to luck than brilliant stock picking. Hence the reluctance for a few of us risking to roll the dice again on stocks like APT when the opportunity availed itself in March with the proceeds of our A2M profits.