There are no
perfect investors.
Warren Buffett, George Soros and Peter Lynch have all slipped up from time to time. That doesn't stop them from being great investors who are
worth studying and
learning from. That said, you should never mimic an
investing strategy that you do not fully understand. There is too much guru-ism going on among investors - so much so that credentials are often lost beneath book titles in which the word "rich" is prominently featured. As with the early caution against trusting
authority, you have to question everything. Even if a strategy works for a certain
period of time, once it becomes widespread, it skews the
system. For example, the
publication of Lynch's
tenbagger strategy has led to too many people
searching for those stocks,
leading prices to become inflated to adjust for the non-market driven
demand. Skeptics survive on
Wall Street much longer than believers.