Does that follow from the graphs? Yeah a few really stunk up the joint so to speak, but some of those other multi-year holdings are huge wins, and I’m not sure we know what they did in the early years? One could do some deeper data-mining and possibly determine something like, “if I am down >20% after 600 days, the investment never comes back.” But I’m not sure that can be inferred from what is shown above. (If it can please explain.) I think for all we know all those guys sitting at +100%, +1000d, were once -20%, 200d.

I’ll say for my own part, I kept track of something similar for myself, doing a histogram of investments vs. profits. I realized I kept having a few stinkers wreck otherwise decent returns. I tried a number of different things in hopes of identifying and separating the good from the bad. Nothing worked and I was left always second guessing myself. I eventually found using fixed dollar amounts and options was more suited to my type of win/loss, and suprisingly (because at my rational level I’d much prefer to be a long-term, deep-value buy and holder) my own personal style (in practice I’m much more at ease now and I’m not always second guessing myself). I still get the stinkers, but now they don’t hang around and they don’t overwhelm my winners. My win percentage is the same as it ever was, but now my winners and losers are balanced in size.

I bring this up to say there are multiple styles of investing (obviously) and objectively looking at your own historical results (as David has shown here) may yield surprising insights for yourself.

-Andy

What’s you average return in a “difficult” market. Let’s say, since August last year?

That analysis would probably be more intuitive to the reader, and provide a useful basis for comparison to the reader’s absolute or relative benchmark of choice.