Few financial endeavours have occupied the time of more men over more years with less success than attempting to ?beat the market?. So many have tried and failed that it has become popular to believe that no one can consistently outperform the averages.

Nothing could be further from the truth! Some (equity) investors, utilizing more sophisticated approaches than the public at large, can earn much higher returns, year in and year out,? says the author of this article. And such higher returns from stocks can lead to ?riches beyond the dreams of avarice?. Read on to find out how?

The endless quest by fundamentalists and technicians alike to discover the secret of calling market turns is driven by a knowledge of the incredible returns a completely successful timing strategy would yield.

Consider, for example, that from early 1964 through the end of 1984, the average New York Stock Exchange common stock provided its holders with a total return from dividends and capital appreciation of 11% per annum compounded. By comparison, an investor with the intelligence and foresight to step out of stocks and hold cash during the three bear markets of the period could have earned nearly twice that return ? 21% per annum compounded. He could have achieved such a performance without ever picking a single stock or speculating on margin; by merely buying and selling ?the market? (which is easier than you might think).

Taking the illustration a step further, an investor who actually sold the market short during the three bear moves (instead of just holding cash) would have reaped an additional profit sufficient to increase the compounded return to 27% per annum, a stunning cumulative return of 13,812% (see Table 1).

But let us take our illustration yet a further step. An investor who perfectly forecast every up and down market swing of at least 5% during those years, buying just before each up move and selling short just before the market was about to drop 5% or more, would have garnered a return approaching an astounding 52.4 million percent, equivalent to nearly doubling his money every year!

Perfectly forecasting even small price swings would naturally lead to even larger profits, although ultimately (broker) commission costs would equal the size of the swing itself and eat up all gains.

So the next time you hear someone say that all you need to do is buy good stocks and hold them, think of these comparisons of "buy and hold" with various market timing strategies.

Of course, few investors ever time a single market cycle to perfection, much less repeat the feat year in and year out.? And accurately timing all market moves as small as 5% is simply impossible. Indeed, the incredible returns of the short term trading strategies shown in Table 2 demonstrate how improbable such perfect timing is. Thus, the endless quest for new market timing techniques is based less on a belief that perfection is achievable than on an understanding of how profitable even the slightest success in market timing can be.

Even readily attainable levels of market timing success can have a dramatic impact on overall returns. For example, an investor who was short for only one- quarter of each of those three bear markets in the past twenty years would have spared himself half the losses incurred by his fully invested counterparts, and his $ 10,000 would have grown to $237,790 ? tripling the profits of buy and hold.

Just what magnitude of returns constitutes a realistic expectation is a function of the degree of forecasting accuracy that can, in practice, be achieved.? It might seem likely that accurate market forecasts for the next few days would be relatively easy to achieve, and that any prediction of prices six months or a year in the future would be highly conjectural. Interestingly enough, exactly the opposite is true; long-term market cycles are much easier to anticipate than day-to-day wiggles in the averages. Furthermore, besides being exceedingly difficult to predict, small, brief price movements are rendered even less profitable by the burden of repeated transactions costs.

Be it from impatience or curiosity, most investors are unduly concerned about what the market will do in the next few days when their attention would far better be focused on where the market will be in three, six, or twelve months. The answers to questions about tomorrow's ripple may be more interesting, but answers to questions about the major trend are ultimately far more profitable.