It's not really elitist. Picking individual stocks is essentially saying "I have brand new insight that nobody else has, and I'm going to earn profit by incorporating that knowledge into prices and be rewarded forgetting it right". This is clearly a very specialized activity, you shouldn't expect to be able to bring brand new, accurate insight, and out predict everyone else in the world, without a deep understanding of economics, finance, and expertise in the specific industry and the company you're trading in. It's no more elitist to say "most people should just buy index funds" than it is to say "most people should just get root canals done by dentists rather than doing it themselves".
Well… yes, index funds are a safe, default choice most people. And yet, a funny thing about investing, versus other things professionals do like dentistry, is that it doesn’t necessarily require any skill. Dumb luck sometimes works just as well as sophisticated analysis. What other professions are like that?
I don’t think I had any particular insight into Google, but I worked there and never got around to exercising my options until I had to because they were going to expire. (Good thing HR sent me an email.) The slightly more sophisticated people were doing same-day sales and immediately diversifying, which I believe in, in principle. But I procrastinated, because it seemed like delaying was working out pretty well. Past performance is no guarantee, but why not wait a few months?
I thought Google was doing well, but so did everyone else. It was conventional wisdom the whole time. Apparently conventional wisdom wasn’t priced in, though?
> without a deep understanding of economics, finance, and expertise in the specific industry and the company you're trading in.
is in contradiction to
>It's not really elitist.
It's not wrong. But elitist is absolutely is. We're saying, only these people can do these things correctly. Is it true? It's subject to debate. You can be in IT, discover a software product at work and decide you think the company is worth investing in. Don't need an MBA for that.
Well, buying stock in a company because you like their product is precisely the kind of bad stock picking strategy I'm talking about. The quality of a company's product is public information, so you should expect it to be priced in. Whether or not to pick any individual stock should be made on the basis of whether that stock is over-valued or under-valued in the market, not if it's a good company overall. Amazing companies can be highly overvalued, and crap companies doing garbage work can be undervalued.
Like I say, best to leave it to professionals. For some things it's fine for people to have a DIY spirit, like building a website or a cabinet. For other things, which can harm you if you mess up, it's better to leave it to the pro's... electricians, doctors, etc. We're talking about people's life savings here, they can easily lose everything and ruin their lives, not being able to take care of their family etc.
>Amazing companies can be highly overvalued, and crap companies doing garbage work can be undervalued.
I'm sorry, but how does value matter? I'm not being flippant - the Mag 7 are not 'value' companies. Are Nvidia, Apple, etc., overvalued? And so we should avoid them or short them? Is Tesla 'priced-in'? There's all sorts of psychology in the market. What does 'priced-in' even mean? What wouldn't be priced in. "Water is wet" is what I think of, a tautology, when I hear that all public information is 'priced in'. Things are incredibly dynamic. Here we have at a minimum: algorithmic trading that bounces on common measures like moving averages, institutions that buy or sell at various points strategically (like the big dump when the BOJ raised rates unexpectedly, tax selling, etc.), elections putting oligarch-ish types that own car companies and pump crypto coins, meme stocks that come and go on big reddit forums, regular buys from 401k's into indexes which move markets, etc. etc. With all that going on, to me it feels more "random" than "priced-in".
One more thing. Money is also made not buying and holding, and not trading, but by doing things like 'The Wheel' where you sell puts on something you wouldn't mind holding, monthly, til you get assigned, and sell calls on it, monthly, til it gets called away. In this case, you don't actually have to care very much what the 'value' is, only tracking whether it might have a sudden swing. You don't have to 'time the market' that much either, as you're an insurance salesman.
I'm not saying that people should all jump and do this - but when I read about stocks on HN, I always hear the same counter-argument against 'traders' and 'stock pickers' when there are other ways to make money in the market (i.e. collecting premium).
It's definitely closer to 'gambling' when I put it that way. But I don't see any value in Efficient Market Hypothesis-speak like "is this stock under or over-valued." For that I let the MBA's / golf course discussions / elite experts with insider information rule.
If you compare the forward PE ratio to the regular PE ratio on most of these stocks you will see their profits are growing extremely fast. NVDA has a trailing PE of 55 but a forward PE of 32. TSM has PE of 33 but a forward of 23! A business growing profitability that fast is going to be valued at a premium.
But, when buying those stocks, you're paying for perfect execution. If profit growth doesn't meet expectations, there's a lot of room for the valuation (and the stock price) to fall.
> You can be in IT, discover a software product at work and decide you think the company is worth investing in.
And then you can be still be wrong because you didn't appreciate that the company is operating a low-trust environment/switching costs are high/they didn't have enough industry contacts/competitors outmarketed.
