I think you are referring to the Dalbar Study when you (correctly) say: “In the long run when index profits were about 12% investors’ actual profit was about 2%”.

As for me … risk is my middle name, but not in high-risk stock trading strategies.

You can find my story here:

http://7million7years.com/2008/04/25/my-7-million-dollar-journey/

My blog doesn’t focus on trading stocks but actually quite the opposite. I try to inform people about the hazards of being too active in the markets. My ultimate goal is to achieve the financial independence and the blog follows my path on this track. As I also study finance in the university I’m also writing about different finance theories behind these things.

As I see it every one of us has the chance of achieving financial independence. We just must start investing early and have to stick with it, no matter of how economy looks like. This is almost quaranteed way of getting rich but as it’s very slow not that many have motivation for it.

Some people will ofcourse argue that timing is everything but academic researches show that we are extremely lousy in timing. We usually sell when we should be buying and vice versa. In the long run when index profits were about 12% investors’ actual profit was about 2% because of this reason. Hence most people are better to stick with indexes and use dollar cost averaging.

Ofcourse some people do get rich fast using high risk (like you?). But as it’s actually very few that are able to do it I can’t personally recommed it. It all basically is just about standard deviation (and variance) here.