That being said, an individual who specialized in that kind of data acquisition and analysis at a firm can do well on their own by targeting specific equities with only one or two streams of revenue. But it's still difficult and that individual would probably be trading in a manual capacity.
In the 1990 you could have beaten the market by simply realizing that the PC was going to explode into an everyday item and simply focused on buying and holding the sector vs any one stock. That's not going to see huge daily gains, but on the backs of huge successes like Dell it could easily have turned ~100k into retirement money in a decade.
(1) the US will move to single payer health care. Besides the growing popular support for this, there is a coming crisis of corporate, municipal, and state pension funds which are unfunded to pay for their growing health care commitments. Single payer will be used to bail out those pension liabilities.
(2) Climate change. Consider effects on real estate of the placement of storm barriers, the increases of flood tides, etc.
(3) Self-driving cars. Lots of unexplored knock-on implications of the cultural changes. Dropoff without parking may reinvigorate walkable downtowns. Driving without attention required will enable longer commutes and combined work+commute with mobile offices. Cheaper last-mile delivery may push more retail shopping online. Introduction of drive-thru services targetting unoccupied vehicles -- dispatch a car to fetch something. The now high-end service of going shopping and asking for items to be sent back to your home could become commonplace.
(4) demographics. You can predict China's growth will soon slow looking at how the age distribution is projected to change.
Oil companies are still going to be making tons of money in 10 years, but people will start to doubt their future without heavy diversification. Whichever company wins to battle for solar cell manufacturing is going to become the next Exxon, but it's going to be a long brutal slog. Still if your in your 20's buying and holding any company that looks to have an advantage in this space is a long term winning strategy even if most of them will fail.
I'm the same way. I put money in, buy more shares of whatever ETF I deem worthy, and outside of the occasional sell to fund another ETF purchase, I don't touch it. It fluctuates, but ultimately goes up.
But, man oh man, do I fantasize about trading. When I look at the underlying stocks in an ETF that's doing good for me, and some of them have these massive YTD returns, I get the itch.
It's a big cut for doing something I could do manually but I'm super lazy and it's a percentage of not much money anyways.
[0] https://wealthsimple.com or https://wealthsimple.com/invite/FCU4AG if you want a referral link which gives you (and me) some extra discounts.
There's also discounts for referrals which helps lower it.
The only thing happening is the low value brokers/traders are being taken out of the system and automated, just like people were made redundant in other industries. But for investors who like digging in and doing their homework, opportunity is abound. Everyone else can enjoy their standard index returns to keep up with inflation.
I just keep my retirement savings in a robo-investment account now, balancing ETFs. Hands off the wheel, don't think about it, don't mess with it.
[0]Fintech wasn't for me. Just didn't enjoy it. [1]StreetContxt. Cool folks, great company.