Most PROFESSIONAL stock pickers don't beat the market. And those that do, a tiny fraction can do it consistently over a 5-10 year time frame.
This is backed up by decades of data. But we still have millions of people who apparently think they are smarter than the thousands of professional stock-pickers who have MAs, PhDs and years of experience and do it full-time and still don't beat the market.
And sure, many average joes were wildly successful with GME or whatever the latest meme stock is. Just as many people made a ton of money in the last tech bubble. Check back in 5-10 years...
I'm counting on being luckier than those guys more than anything.
Any yes, what people on WallStreetBets are doing is gambling. Which is perfectly fine, I just wish more would acknowledge it.
From a valuation perspective, what's so wrong about that? You want to be on the side taking over the world. Otherwise you're on the side that's getting taken over, and the value of your equity logically trends toward zero.
They have a decent position in online retail, but they are very far from owning all of retail.
At some point (perhaps now) Amazon growth is predicated on cannibalizing other companies. After all, the broad market can't exceed the GDP generally for the long term.
My primary point here is not to argue about investment concepts, merely to state a concern about the artificiality of it all. Financialization is real and rather spooky.