Charlie went on to say that after you have $100,000, you let your money work for you. To accomplish this using the best version of Stars takes 7 years at $5,000 per year or 5 years at $10,000 per year. I used twice the S&P as the return which is what the Stars return has been running. If the market was in a prolonged market like ‘98 – ‘10, it would take longer.

If you start investing at 30 and have $100,000 by age 40, you will have $12 million by age 65. This is based on returns of 21% per year which is the 27 year back tested history of the best version of the Stars buy and hold strategy.

These returns seem unbelievable. Your usual diversified risk adjusted return strategy will probably be less than 10% per year because the average investor has been 5% below the S&P for 70 years.

In the strategy outlined above you don’t need to invest any more after age 40. What you can do is continue to invest in a separate account using your strategy and see if what I suggest works as I say. The above strategy does have drawdown as do all buy and hold strategies.

In 2025 the return for Stars was 25%. That was a difficult year for most because of very narrow market breadth. Stars outperformed the average of the performance of Berkshire Hathaway, Blackrock, and Blackstone by 20 percentage points.