Picking stocks is not an exercise in futility. With patience and persistence, you can not only beat indexes like the S&P 500, you can beat the pros on Wall Street, as well. In fact, you -- the individual investor -- have an advantage over those slick professionals. As valuation luminary Dr. Aswath Damodaran told Fool co-founder Tom Gardner in an interview, "There are enough openings in the market that somebody who really understands what they're doing and knows their strengths and weaknesses can take advantage."
The individual investor's advantages
The biggest competitive advantage that individual investors have is that we can afford to hold stocks for five years or more. Most Wall Street pros can't do that. As Dr. Damodaran said, "They have too many competitive pressures forcing them to be short term."
How does this help you? Master investor Ben Graham put it best when he said that in the short term the market is a voting machine; in the long term it is a weighing machine. In other words, the market becomes much more predictable as your time frame lengthens. By being able to hold great stocks without needing to gloss up performance for the sake of advertising, you reduce fees and taxes and let the market's historical lessons go to work for your portfolio.
Next, your personal portfolio has no constraints other than your own liquidity. Unlike many funds that set market cap, style, or country constraints, you can invest wherever you smell opportunity. It's OK to lose to the market for a few months (or even years) if you've set yourself up to profit handsomely for the next 10.
For evidence of your advantage, consider the plight of spinoffs in the market. A spinoff is when a large company creates a new, independent company from an existing division.
These large, widely held firms are spinning off smaller, lesser-known quantities, so prices of spinoffs tend to be depressed in the short term. They are sold by institutions that cannot hold the new shares because of market cap or other constraints -- and this creates opportunity.
Take, for example, UAP Holding
The Foolish bottom line
Spinoffs are just one example of how enterprising individual investors have an advantage over Wall Street professionals. But as Dr. Damodaran says, "This is a very tough game to win. It requires a lot of homework."
Lead analyst Philip Durell loves a good spinoff to help boost the returns of Motley Fool Inside Value. To see how spinoffs are helping Inside Value outperform the market, take a free 30-day trial.
This article, originally published on Jan. 6, 2006, is one of a series. The rest of the stories are here.
Do you consider yourself a special situations investor, or are you interested in learning more about these opportunities? Tell us about your interests in our very brief Special Situations Investing Survey. Your comments will help us develop future content to fit your needs.
David Meier updated this article originally written by Tim Hanson. David does not own shares of any company mentioned. Merck is a Motley Fool Income Investor recommendation. No Fool is too cool for disclosure.
