Back when I first started learning about investing, I decided to start from the beginning and read basic books on personal finance as well as guides for understanding all of the investment world in a nut shell. Most of these authors were very knowledgeable and informative, but their investment advice was far too conservative for my taste. They would literally write chapter after chapter talking about the differences between conservative investing, which according to them generally yields somewhere around 5% PA, as opposed to risky investing which usually meant a diversified stock/mutual fund portfolio yielding (in my mind) only slightly higher averages. What kind of returns can you expect in the stock market? Well they say the market has gone up an average of 10% a year since Adam and Eve. Popular indexes like the DOW and the now more popular S&P500 have always, like real estate, gone up over time.
Now, these market averages are almost worshiped like golden calves. Repeatedly drilled into my brain was the concept that there were hundreds (if not thousands) of fund managers and other professionals out there with Harvard degrees, decades of experience, millions of...