Disclaimer
Do I need to put a disclaimer on my own notes? I’m not a financial advisor, I don’t have a license, this is not advice, I’m not liable for any decisions you don’t make. Don’t sue me.
I think investing in single stocks is pretty much the biggest myth that gets constantly paraded around in “get-rich” type content. Trying to find the needle is not worth your time. Buy the haystack instead.
No one has managed to beat the market consistently for over 30+ years. People can do it in 1, 5, 10, even 20 year spurts, but no one has ever done it for 30 years. Why? The market is the sum of people’s decision-making. If someone is successful at decision-making, other people are going to copy them. There’s a first-movers advantage, and in the age of the internet, that has functionally evaporated.
Warren Buffet challenged a group of hedge fund managers in 2008 to beat his buy of the S&P500. 10 years later, he overwhelmingly won. Like, this is thee Warren Buffet, regarded as the greatest investor of all-time. And he won by doing something anyone can do, which is buy the S&P500 (or more broadly, an index).
This general idea is called the Efficient Market Hypothesis. There are several forms of it, strong weak etc. I don’t remember the name of the variant that I believe in, but I believe it’s impossible to beat the market consistently unless you have insider information.
Hedge funds get a lot of praise but don’t actually have much to show for it. Indeed, hedge funds aren’t designed to grow your money, but to grow your money consistently. Sure, on a year-to-year basis you might outperform the S&P in a given year, but why care about that? Your goal is to grow your money over a long period of time, not to withdraw it on a year-to-year basis. You probably work a job, earn your money through there. They also charge a ridiculous fee, so even if they are growing your money, they’re likely taking a huge chunk of it into their own properties.
You can be lucky, you could be right, you could really be smarter than the market. You’re not, no one is. So like, buy your index funds. All the effort you spend towards thinking about stocks, spent it towards increasing your earning potential. The ROI on that is stronger than it’ll ever be on stocks.