If you are reading this, you can probably consider yourself lucky.
It should be stated up front that this has little to do with the quality of the column before you. Rather, it’s because the fact of your reading it suggests you live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with spare capital to deploy. Stockpicking is, by proxy, a rich person's problem.
Warren Buffett, history’s most over-analysed investor, has never shied from highlighting the role of luck in his life. Not only has he regularly referred to his birth date and US citizenship as the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket, but he even puts part of his enormous investing success down to fortune. “In some cases,” he wrote in 2022, “bad moves by me have been rescued by very large doses of luck.”