I don't think that's as useless a tip as you make it sound.
Suppose everybody invests in exactly the S&P 500. Nevertheless, each person can decide to hold the more speculative stocks in their Roth IRA and the others in a regular IRA, 401k, or taxable account.
That doesn't require identifying the best investments, just the relatively volatile ones.
So it seems like logical advice that is practical to implement, to me.
Nobody here thinks people can do that. I asserted the tip is meaningful even assuming people can't pick winners.
The universe of available stocks contains different companies, with different market capitalizations, and different historical volatilities.
Assuming you can't select the best performing ones, you can still select the ones that are smaller and more volatile.
Do you have an issue with the assertion that owning foreign stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, etc (for a US person) is best done in a taxable account and not an IRA? Or does market efficiency indicate to you that shouldn't matter?
> “You want to put in [to a Roth IRA] highly undervalued assets that could grow massively in value,” Joshua Sheats, the host of the show, said on an episode that extensively praised Thiel’s strategy.
So the "investing tip" is to gamble on wildly speculative investments rather than invest in index funds. Investing in highly undervalued assets - it's so simple, why didn't I think of that sooner!?
This will make a few wildly rich, and many more will underperform the market. On average, everyone will do just as well as an index fund would've, because averaging is the entire point of index funds.
I'd be way more interested in repeatable advice for how to turn $2000 into $5B than I am in how to avoid paying taxes on it.