What would you say set the best investors apart from other average or poor investors?

Agreed with Cedric on time in the market rather than timing the market

Imho... It's probably mostly to do with mentality/attitude, as with most things... Including their own business/career track.

Knowledge can be learnt/acquired.
Time in the market, learning to control emotions and greed, that is all learnt too. So that accounts for some part of the success, but it isn't something that others can't pick up.

The real grut is being accountable to yourself, facing up to your own mistakes, learning from the mistakes and figuring out what works and what doesn't. Over time, the "system" gets refined, and the returns just get better...

Eg we learn that fees eat into returns, so we learn to be more conscious at looking at them. We learn how to read financials and just avoid investments that have "low value".

On the flip side, the not so good investors / REITs managers would tend more often to

• buy/sell on hearsay without doing homework.

• blame everything other than themselves when they lose money. It's never their fault.

• not willing to face up to the outcome and then taking actions. Surely everyone gets an investment wrong once in a while or lost to the irrational side, but the better ones do self-reflection, admit the loss, cut loss, take action and move on to "regain lost ground".

The good REITs managers look at their own KPIs, know when to step in take action to manage rentals, and improve the business results. The better results are an outcome of their business management.

Using math as an example, if you wanted to get A1, but your past results have been a C... You could blame your teacher, your mother, the question setter... But what's concrete to improving your results is an understanding, revision, doing ten-year series. If you realize your talents aren't in math, maybe you take that as learning to look at other fields where you actually excel. It's making progress from your actions that matter the most.