I don't see how the weird corollary the comic mentions could work. if you were to pick stocks that consistently underperform the market and someone used your choices as a metric of what NOT to pick (with the idea of thus outperforming the market with their choices) they'd be much more likely to simply pick a majority of mediocre to average stocks instead of special winners, since the selection of stagnant or only modestly growing stocks is much bigger than either the selection of underperformers or major growth choices.