£1000 > £10,000 in 1 year

mkooo

Sounds very unrealistic perhaps, 10x your initial investment in one year, not common at all.. right?

What I want to know though is with hard work and time, lets say a few hours a week for a year maybe 6 hours a week on average, so about 300 hours in total to turn £1000 of your cash into £10,000.
So that essentially makes each hour you put into it worth £30 ontop of your investment.



It might be the case that you only have to spend even less of that time.

How likely do you think it is that anyone could do this?

Sure it can be done, investment in a high-growth startup and a high dose of luck, but X10 your initial investment is not easily reached what so ever.

It's not that I don't have ideas of starting points to do this, I'd just like to get an opinion from others as to the likelihood that any normal folk with the right knowledge could achieve this.


What are your thoughts?

Jegersmart

In the past 22 or so years, I have managed to do this in 3 of those years.

I could put it down to skill or hard work but I would be allowing myself to be fooled by randomness. I can honestly only put this down to luck and if anyone achieves this on a regular basis then there is a lot of luck involved.

One cannot just expect something like this because one "spends time" on it.....

J

grey_gym_sock

without a dose of luck, or inside info, no.

marathonic

About 300 hours in total is about 1,700 less than the average manager of a high-risk growth fund - where anything over 25% in a year is nothing but sheer luck, boosted by a rising market in general!!!

gozomark

well, if you have the right knowledge (insider) then its very likely. If you don't, it doesn't really matter how many hours you put into it, your return will be mainly down to luck not effort or even skill.

mkooo

Interesting, so the general consensus seems to be for the ordinary folk it would almost certainly come down to complete luck.

For someone a little more informed largely luck

For someone with insider knowledge a small - medium degree of luck.

marathonic

Jegersmart wrote: »

In the past 22 or so years, I have managed to do this in 3 of those years.

I could put it down to skill or hard work but I would be allowing myself to be fooled by randomness. I can honestly only put this down to luck and if anyone achieves this on a regular basis then there is a lot of luck involved.

One cannot just expect something like this because one "spends time" on it.....

J

Interesting. I assume that this was one share rising 10-fold in a multi-share portfolio.

If so, were you ever tempted to sell and take profits (or at least sell enough to regain your initial investment)? If it was a 10-fold rise in your entire portfolio, well done. I'd think that 3 times in 22 years would be well above the norm.

My single best share investment, which I got out of FAR too early, was Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) back in January 2009 (bought for $93.82 and sold 9 months later for $248.05).

dtsazza

mkooo wrote: »

Interesting, so the general consensus seems to be for the ordinary folk it would almost certainly come down to complete luck.

For someone a little more informed largely luck

For someone with insider knowledge a small - medium degree of luck.

For that sort of return - it's almost entirely down to luck if it's not illegal. It should be pretty obvious that if it's possible to get a 900% return without relying on luck, then there's enough of a market there that well-funded and dedicated fund managers would be doing this semi-regularly.

As a member of the "ordinary folk", you can make some sensible choices to maybe push your returns a few percentage points upwards, and dampen volatility.

But it makes no sense to think that there are realistic, reproducible actions that one could take to reliably get 900% returns. To me it would be impossible to explain what happens in reality, if that were the case, so it must be a false premise.

Jegersmart

marathonic wrote: »

Interesting. I assume that this was one share rising 10-fold in a multi-share portfolio.

If so, were you ever tempted to sell and take profits (or at least sell enough to regain your initial investment)? If it was a 10-fold rise in your entire portfolio, well done. I'd think that 3 times in 22 years would be well above the norm.

My single best share investment, which I got out of FAR too early, was Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) back in January 2009 (bought for $93.82 and sold 9 months later for $248.05).

This is a total portfolio increase in excess of 10x, and I freely admit that it was down to luck. When I was younger I took a lot more risk than I do these days.

Having said that, these were "outlier years" - my ISA's since 1999 have achieved an overall average annualised gain of 7.24%, my non ISA/SIPP investments an average of 13.84% over 5.5 years and the reporting of my SIPP shows 11.24% although I will have to go back and check over which period as I don't remember when I first started them - let's say 3.5 years approx?

Clearly the ISA's have the longest history here and whilst it would seem that I have outperformed the "average" return in the period that doesn't mean that I will continue to do so in the future.

My background is within financial and energy markets where I have been working in a variety of different capacities. I don't have "insider knowledge" but I do watch the global markets like a hawk and try to uncover opportunities whenever possible. I tend to be very risk-shy when markets are near or past recent price tops, and very aggressive indeed when there is panic. If I look back at my history, this typically indicates that I miss out on a proportion of the last 5-10% of bull runs (I don't sell all, I start to rotate over a period) but I don't often miss out on the start of a new one. Whilst I absolutely try to time the markets, I don't try to buy the bottom normally - I usually wait for a breakout of the down trend with tranches so I don't over expose myself initially but then stay "long and strong" until a break of the new trend is confirmed in most cases, although with very strong impulsive moves I have taken profits on a part of the holding if conditions are way overbought on long timescales (recent example: Japan). This seems to work for me over a long period of time but it is not for everyone due to the experience, interest and mentality required. When I say "mentality" I mean that when I do what I do I absolutely take full responsibility for my actions. That is why I rarely have a diversified position (unless I "migrate" through one due to altering allocations over a time period) - because I don't want to ensure *average* performance. In taking these types of decisions, a lot of people would not feel comfortable doing so and I completely understand that view - which is why people tend to diversify their portfolios to a fairly large degree.

I still think that investing is a very subjective and personal activity in which there can be no general "right answer". Whilst a Vanguard Lifestrategy fund can be the right vehicle for some, it could possibly be any less right for me - and vice versa. Basically, if you feel stressed at any time about what you are doing then you are doing something wrong for you.....that is why I often wade in on threads where most people advocate "diversification".

Try to understand "risk" as much as possible, to me volatility is not risk in some of my portfolios where I do not need the funds for many years (such as SIPP etc).

All imho

J

N1AK

mkooo wrote: »

Sounds very unrealistic perhaps, 10x your initial investment in one year, not common at all.. right?

What are your thoughts?

No. Achieving that kind of return would require luck. There are plenty of people out there who put massive amounts of time and effort into investing. If that was all it took then we'd be up to our eyeballs in investment opportunities to give someone our money and get a 400% return (with them pocketing the other 500%); the fact we aren't should be a decent clue.

You may as well bet the £1,000 on a street in roulette; you'd have a 8.5% chance of walking away with £11,000

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

mkooo wrote: »

What I want to know though is with hard work and time, lets say a few hours a week for a year maybe 6 hours a week on average, so about 300 hours in total to turn £1000 of your cash into £10,000.

It can be done.

But not with "investments".

Buying and selling items such as watches, jewellery, cars, motorbikes, etc, then yes I'd say so. And even then you have to know what you're doing, specialise in a few items/areas that you know (or can learn) really well, and be ready to jump in when the rare uber-deals present themselves.

I've been doing exactly that as a hobby for years, I average a few grand a year in profits, and I enjoy the items while I own them. I spend a an hour or two a week looking for deals online, use and enjoy the items I buy, and resell once I get bored of owning whatever it is.

If I ever quit my job I'd be confident I could earn a basic living just doing that.

But I'd have to put a bit more time into it than I do now!