Reading the ihub thread it's easy to see why 95 percent of people in the stock market lose money, 6 years or so ago as an experiment I set up two portfolios on yahoo finance. I randomly picked enough tickers so I could say they were diversified. When I looked at it today ( I had forgotten I did this) One was up over 8000 and the other over 14000. On one 3 tickers were no longer valid, still, it profited.