I agree with this. I made a 32x return on a front-month WAY out of the money options trade in March of 2008. I tried to pull it off again and lost all of it. Good tuition money.
I always wonder why to invest it all... at the very least, if I gained 10x or 32x, I'd save away the original amount or a small fraction of the total, and NOT gamble with that.
There is substantial research that suggests taking a moderate asset allocation combined with annual rebalancing will have a fairly predictable return over the long run (a decade or more).
If you're making trades frequently, you're probably (as shown by research) throwing that money away.
There are always things that go up, and others that go down, but a well constructed portfolio will do more of the former and less of the latter. Annual rebalancing then buys the cheaper asset (by definition, on a relative basis, the cheaper asset is bought and the expensive asset sold when rebalancing).
And yes, it is actually that simple. The problem is (as someone else on this thread had posted): fear and greed. If you can ignore that, you can do well.
