Investing in the stock market can never be described as being easy. However this doesn't stop thousands of people trying to generate some profits by investing their own money into the stock market. In fact people will often give up their day jobs in order to try and trade stocks on a full time basis from home.

So it is worth talking about what kind of gains are possible when you devote all of your time and energy into this pursuit. I have been doing this for many years now, so I'm pretty well qualified to offer my opinion.

A lot of people will start investing their own money with the simple aim being to make as much money as possible. They will not have any kind of targets in mind. They will just try and seek out some good quality stocks and see where this takes them.

I don't recommend that you actually set targets for yourself because this can affect your decision making process regarding when to buy shares and when to bank profits. However you shouldn't expect to make huge amounts of money every single year, or expect to achieve unrealistic profit targets.

If you look at the performance of various fund managers, you will see that they do not make huge gains of 100 percent or 200 percent per year, for example. However the best fund managers will often make between 20 percent and 40 percent per year, which is an outstanding performance.

So this is the kind of target you should be aiming for yourself, although in many cases the movements of the wider markets during a particular year will affect how well you do.

For example in a bullish market that rises all year long, a profit of between 20 and 40 percent will be a very solid performance. However in a bearish market where the markets have been falling quite a bit, you should be very pleased if you make 10 to 15 per cent in that year. Indeed most fund managers will be happy just to make a profit in these years.

Therefore it is worth bearing in mind that your performance will generally fluctuate quite a bit from year to year, depending on how the wider market moves and the current state of the economy. One thing you should always do is reinvest your dividends because this will boost your profits even further during the good years, and possibly keep your head above water during the bad years. Investing is never easy, but there are some decent profits to be made if you know what you're doing.