Sure, but if you do understand what a company is doing under the hood, you can make informed long-term investments based on that (which still pose a risk because of the reasons you stated). If you knew Facebook's history and engineering practices years ago you would have accurately predicted that the other shoe would eventually drop. If you paid attention to Microsoft's shift in focus you would either have thought that it was foolish to try to beat Amazon or it was a great space to invest in because AWS has many flaws. I dunno, I'm just trying to say that knowledge about this stuff can give you an edge in investing.