The similarities are many. Both asset classes employ a lot of marketing to get you to buy things, things with a commission attached or with a profit built in. Both industries rely on the image of a perpetual bull market and to achieve that, both industries ask you to stand back as far as possible and look at averages over a long, long period of time.

Both industries also work very hard to make everything appear low risk, safe and cuddly, the safer it appears the more likely it is that their customers will buy something. Both industries also use a lot of successful hand-picked examples in hindsight, make out that everyone always wins and both industries, like those TV screens in the Bellagio in Vegas, raise up their winners as examples of the norm and rely on the losers to find dark corners lest they be revealed as fools.

It's the same in every industry and that's marketing, the process of manoeuvring potential customers into a "comfort zone" from which they will buy. It may not be safe, but everyone is trying to make it appear so.

And there is one final similarity, a hard-won truth understood by all experienced investors in both property and shares, that success will come not from the long-term averages, but will reflect the specific stocks or properties you buy and sell and how well they do between the time you buy them and the time you sell them.

In other words, your experience will not mimic hand-picked examples in hindsight, the success of Warren Buffett or the long-term average. Your experience will stand alone, as unique as you are, a personal experience that will have nothing to do with everyone else and everything to do with you, reflecting your knowledge, skill, patience, research, prudence and luck.

For shares, it's about what particular stock you choose and why and then, how vigilant and disciplined you are in controlling the outcome. To make the point, the ASX 100, an index of what you might call Blue Chip shares (if there is such a thing), was up 10.2 per cent in the last 12 months.

But while that number might be used in the press or a marketing brochure, for that number to be of any significance at all you would have had to be invested in something that reflected the whole ASX 100 Index, or in the case of property, the whole property market, because when you drill a bit deeper, to the specifics, you will find that the top 10 stocks in the ASX 100 actually averaged a rise of 49 per cent in the last year and the bottom 10 averaged a loss of 22 per cent. And if we go a bit deeper to the ASX 200, the top and bottom 10 stocks averaged plus 82 per cent and minus 45 per cent and for the All Ordinaries Index, plus 352 per cent and minus 83 per cent. Investing in shares is all about which stocks you are in and when, not what the average of all the stocks was.

For the property market it is the same. When did you buy? What did you buy? Where did you buy? What's that suburb doing? What's the rental market doing? How was it financed? What are the tax implications? Who is the tenant? Are they reliable? Do you have the time to manage it yourself or do you have to pay someone else? What's the zoning? What other developments are likely in the area?

They say the sharemarket is a battlefield and every share trade is a skirmish that will be won or lost. It is the same with property. It is about specifics.

So don't get sold on the marketing, the long-term averages, the people trying to move you into the comfort zone. Go looking for the people and products that can help you with the specifics. Just as I value the people trying to pick and time stocks, look for the people trying pick and time properties. That's where the value is, in people who drill through the marketing to the specifics.

It's the details that matter, not the marketing. Hope to see you there.

Marcus Padley is the author of the stockmarket newsletter Marcus Today. For a free trial go to marcustoday.com.au