You encounter quite a bit of financial pornography once you are engaged with folks in the fund management industry. Imagine how hard it would be to peddle funds that return 7% a year. I can imagine the pressure for folks in the financial industry to tout returns north of 20%. I do my level best to avoid engaging in financial pornography but it's not as easy as it sounds once you start to conduct some investment training of your own. In my latest class, one of my strategies "unfortunately" backtested 21% returns with a semi-variance of 10%. In this same period if you bought every stock in Singapore in equal proportions you would have only made about 8% with a higher semi-variance of around 12%. If I present these numbers to the public, it is pretty reasonable to say that given that the backtest covered the recovery from 2007-2009, ...