According to Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor one could define an aggressive investor in accordance with the following line (not a verbatim extract from the book):
The difference between a defensive and an aggressive investor is not in the amount of risk that one is willing to take, but in the amount of time and effort one is willing to dedicate to investment.
Reading this forum, I've come across several claims that are very hard to verify, for instance:
- A great amount of fund managers are not able to outperform the market
- Due to the investment fees, it makes very little sense to trade and pick stocks and have more net return after fees than with an index fund
- The last point is due to the fact that even if you were a very brilliant investor, the amount of transactions you need to do in order to beat the market would mean that most of your returns are eaten up by fees.
These claims seem to be widespread on the site, there is no single link I can provide mentioning them, but I imagine that most of you would agree that this is indeed claimed.
Now if I can infer correctly, these last two points are very important because if true they would be true independent of the manager's ability (whilst the first item does not necessarily apply to brilliant investors).
The problem with this is that being an active investor seems to be a very dumb idea. If one reads the most voted answers on investing advice on this website, at least, the buy-and-forget index funds seems to be an universal (almost the only one) good strategy and by trying to outperform it a person is almost guaranteed to lose money.
Then what would motivate an active investor today? I am of course talking about people that would be considered in the public for the referred book, and not Hedge Fund managers or institutional investors. Does it make sense for someone to pursue being an active investor? Does it only make sense for people that actually have a lot of money or are willing to actually put a LOT of effort?