[Shoe]

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You won't be making 30% per year. Lots of people have made 30% per year over the last few years - that'll change soon.

And just because you make good investments on paper, it has no relation to making them for real. Don't underestimate the power of your emotions to lose you money in the markets.

The first sentence in the above quote is your emotions ruling your rational judgement.

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Thank you for the reply, It definitely gives me something to think about. I agree that a 30% average annual return is pretty much impossible to attain by 99% of the people out there (and chances are I belong with the masses). However, I personally believe I can beat the market. It might not be 30%, but ever since I could read I would read the business section of the paper and consistently pick good stocks (but I have no written track record to analyze my results -- so I could very well be just average, or even worse). I am starting to track my results now, and while I am happy with my results so far, I have already learned a few valuable lessons that I would not have otherwise known.

I try my hardest to keep emotions out of my decisions. Thank you for pointing out that I was getting emotional in that part of my post. I now realize that I have been trying to hard to find short-term gains to reach my long-term goals. I know I need to concentrate just on picking good companies at opportine times (such as NTDOY 6-12 months ago), and just be happy with slowly becoming extremely wealthy, and stop looking for the get-rich-quick picks out there that just don't pan out.