By doing homework and research every day and investing only in things you personally deeply understand.
But if you don't want to do that ... passively investing in QQQ would have given you a 5.4X return in the past 10 years.
If you just throw your money across some large, too-big-to-fail companies, you could have 10X'ed easily.
AAPL, NVDA, MSFT, TSLA, NFLX have all >10X in the past 10 years. GOOG, META have come close.
You could have split your money evenly across the biggest 5-10 companies in tech and 10X'ed.
And if you actively invest and do day-to-day research it's fairly easy to beat 10X in 10 years.
By the way my definition of "low risk" is calibrated to the risk of founding your own startup and making 100K/year hoping for a big payout later in the future vs. joining a big company and making 500K/year.
My "startup founder calibrated" low risk stock investment means:
- Reasonably high probability to 10X in 10 years
- Some probability of losing money, but very low probability of losing most of your money
- If you lose money, it's because of a major world situation, and holding for another 10 years will probably get you out of that
- You also have skills and are hireable so you can hold the stocks
AAPL, NVDA (even without the recent events), MSFT, TSLA, NFLX, yeah sure. But out of those, only Apple and Microsoft were reasonable companies to put that kind of money into. I think you're not realizing that you're cherry-picking.
I mean I think your point still stands with just looking at QQQ, but I'm just saying over embellishing hurts your argument, not helps.
I would very much like to know where you can find low-risk investments that are likely to net you 10x-40x returns in the span of 10 years.
(But overall I very much agree with your point that $500k now and $45M later can be a much much much better deal for someone than $0 now and $50M later. I would likely take that deal every single time.)