investing

My friend Sam Fong, founder of the Bay Area-Merced Homebrew Investments Club last year, recently forwarded me an interesting article from Portfolio.com about the money trail of the Church of Scientology -- the church that some of Hollywood's infamous icons such as Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes and John Travolta worship.

Here's the shocking statistic: despite its controversial religion, intense scrutiny by the U.S. government, history of lawsuits, and the recent economic recession, the church still managed to generate a staggering estimated $500+ million in revenues in 2008!

I came across an insightful talk to Harvard Business School MBA students by Mark Sellers, the founder and managing member of Sellers Capital, LLC, a Chicago-based money management firm incepted in 2003 which runs a long/short equity hedge fund and other private investment partnerships.

Here's an excerpt from his talk with advice I've never seen anyone mention before that shows the reality of becoming an equity guru like Warren Buffett...

You have almost no chance of being a great investor. You have a really, really low probability, like 2% or less. And I'’m adjusting for the fact that you all have high IQs and are hard workers and will have an MBA from one of the top business schools in the country soon. If this audience was just a random sample of the population at large, the likelihood of anyone here becoming a great investor later on would be even less, like 1/50th of 1% or something. You all have a lot of advantages over Joe Investor, and yet you have almost no chance of standing out from the crowd over a long period of time.

And the reason is that it doesn’t much matter what your IQ is, or how many books or magazines or newspapers you have read, or how much experience you have, or will have later in your career. These are things that many people have and yet almost none of them end up compounding at 20% or 25% over their careers.