He was a proud guy, and he worked really hard. He had a passion for this business.

The likelihood that an investor might be able to randomly pick the next Picasso -- that's a lot like buying a lottery ticket and hoping to win big. You have no real data here on what the average return is from a random purchase of art.

This gave the holder an annualized return of 17.1 percent. A randomly selected subset of S&P 500 stocks held for the same period would have yielded, in general, an annualized return of approximately 8 percent.