After you study the stock marketing and investing for some time, it's easy to forget that other people don't know what you have come to take for granted.
Many young people and investing newbies want to know how to beat the stock market.
Once you're experienced, this question seems incredibly naive and ignorant.
You know that beating the market is quite difficult, if not nearly impossible.
Yet, young people and other new investors should be cut some slack.
They're used to worlds where there is a proven and learnable way to the top.
In school they learned that students who studied a lot and did well on tests got higher grades than those who didn't.
On the job they can observe that better workers are more likely to get promoted.
Countless people have been advising them on how to study and get better grades, and how to do better on the job in various ways.
They know that not everybody follows this advice and, because they recognize the importance of investing to their financial future, they want to learn and follow the rules of winning at investing.
Also, they've heard about successful investors.
They've heard of Warren Buffett.
They have seen personal finance magazine covers sport such headlines as, "Ten Stocks to Buy This Summer," and they've no doubt heard their parents and others brag of their successes.
Therefore, they fail to recognize that the stock market -- and other financial markets -- are not like school and the workplace.
There's far too much money at stake.
So they read the ordinary investing books and, quite naturally it seems to them, go to Yahoo Answers to find the answer to successful investing.
The financial markets are not structured to dish out rewards to people who follow the many rules.
In school, a few teachers are personally responsible for making sure you get the grades you deserve.
On the job a few bosses are personally responsible for making sure you get the performance evaluations and promotions you deserve.
They can be unfair, but most try to be fair and in the long run balance out the unfair -- or you have the option to drop out or take another job.
In the markets, nobody is in charge.
There is no such thing as "fair" or "unfair.
" Prices go up, prices go down.
Sometimes there seems to be a logic to it, but many times there isn't.
Various financial authors and investors have produced various rules for investing.
Sometimes they work, but they often don't.
Young people and new investors are not used to a system where they are in competition with EVERYBODY at once.
How many people would get an A if they were in graded along with every other student across the United States and much of the world? Not many.
Besides, grades and promotions are not zero-sum games.
One student's A doesn't mean their classmate gets an F.
If one worker is promoted that doesn't mean another is fired.
Yet that's the way the markets work.
Every dollar comes out of somebody's pocket.
Newcomers to the markets just want to learn the formula so they can study it -- and I'm sure many realize it won't be simple or easy.
They don't yet realize that if anybody did know the formula for beating the stock market (doubtful), they'd be crazy to post it online anywhere, let along on Yahoo Answers.