[Silhouette]

I know more than one person who has been "lucky" in that way remarkably consistently for decades. At some point you start to ask if they are making their own luck.

These are all people who have no-nonsense investing strategies. They don't do anything weird or controversial. They typically look for value and fundamentals and they make their biggest gains simply by buying or selling at a good time by recognising something important before the market.

An example I always remember one of them giving me was a company that made building materials. During an exceptionally wet summer a lot of building work stopped because sites were washed out. Stocks in the big homebuilders had fallen heavily and this smaller supplier had tracked them down. However it fell so far that its price-to-book ratio was less than 1. (Roughly speaking that means the cost to buy a share is less than what that share would be worth if you could distribute the current value of the tangible business assets to the shareholders.) My friend invested and after the bad weather passed, trade returned to normal levels, the stock price corrected, and they had made a very good return over a few months.