Do you know how many people investing and/or trading in equity markets truly succeed over long term? Success here means increase in wealth over their investing lifetimes. This group of people includes individual retail folks and professionals. I am sure many of us would have no clue. I do not have any hard core reference to share; however, I can recall reading various percentages that range from 1% to 7%. Without going in specific data points, my observation has been every time this is less than 10% of investing population. More than 90% of the folks will lose money in equity markets over their investing lifetime. Quite startling but this is very true.

We as individuals focus too much on one or two big time success or multipliers but ignore the importance of sustainability and consistency. We fall into the “it is OK” trap. Long term success is not built on few multipliers. Long term success is built on multiple average successes that are sustainable over time.

My articles here may seem to be biased towards long term investing, but irrespective of this, I continue to believe that any form of trading and investing, has its own set of pros and cons. It depends upon what context an individual is looking at it. In the end, trading and investing is done to make money (or increase wealth). Some use approach of capital appreciation, some use dividend income, some do trades to generate income. Like everything else in life, here also, we forget that the key is to have a plan and execute it for consistency.

The lack of discipline is what kills individual retail investors. We do not have conviction to execute our own well crafted ideas. Our ideas are for others to execute. When it comes to dividend investing, each one of us thinks of high yields. The hemisphere of Indian investing blogs is filled with examples of companies that provide high yields. But the missing element is conviction to execute on those ideas. Those ideas of high yield stocks are for others to execute. The missing element is conviction to truly understand what it really means and how it will “help me in my wealth creation”.