Go for growth! The biggest share-market winners over the years have all exhibited tremendous long-term earnings growth - Amazon, Microsoft, CSL, and others. It is those winners that drive overall equity portfolio returns so we must be always on the look-out for growth. By extension, we must avoid earnings tortoises such as the majority of Australian stocks which reinvest too little in their businesses because they pay out too much in dividends, the curse of the dividend imputation system. No reinvestment, no growth.

In the very long-term there is an element of truth in this. Long-...