How hard is it to pick a megastock in advance?

There can’t be many equity investors who haven’t dreamed of picking the next so-called megastock — a stock like Google, Amazon, Microsoft or NVIDIA, for example. If you buy into a stock like that before it takes off, and hold on to it for a long time, the profits you can make are astronomical. But, in practice, how hard is it to pick a megastock in advance?

If you read investment magazines or follow certain influencers on social media, the impression you’re given is that it’s perfectly realistic. There’s always someone telling us how much money they made on, say, BAE Systems, the FTSE 100 stock whose price, at the time of writing, has risen by more than 200% over the last five years.

The fact, however, that others have made a fortune on a particular stock in the past can blind you to the harsh reality that the odds of repeating their success yourself are heavily stacked against you.

So why is that?

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