> In summary, what I’m arguing is that the risks to buying an entire index are underappreciated, and that is possible to look at the financials of a company and see if they’re reasonably priced. I personally sleep better with a portfolio of companies that I think are intrinsically worth what I paid for them.

Yes, you and every other analyst out there. I'm curious to why the author thinks they have some extra informational edge over everyone else with a spreadsheet that allows him to find deals that seem to be invisible to everyone. Hedge funds are using real-time satellite imagery to try to get an edge over other market participants:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-v...

When the author does a buy or sell on a particular stock, why does he think he's getting the better end of the transaction?

Further the author brings up Graham and Dodd, which is now called value investing. While Fama and French show that there's still some premium to it (as mentioned in the article), in his last published interview Graham himself said:

>> In selecting the common stock portfolio, do you advise careful study of and selectivity among different issues?

> In general, no. I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities. This was a rewarding activity, say, 40 years ago, when our textbook "Graham and Dodd" was first published; but the situation has changed a great deal since then. In the old days any well-trained security analyst could do a good professional job of selecting undervalued issues through detailed studies; but in the light of the enormous amount of research now being carried on, I doubt whether in most cases such extensive efforts will generate sufficiently superior selections to justify their cost. To that very limited extent I'm on the side of the "efficient market" school of thought now generally accepted by the professors.

* http://www.grahamanddoddsville.net/wordpress/Files/Gurus/Ben...

That was in 1976.

I ran across an interesting observation by Nick Maggiulli about investing feedback loops:

> For example, any competent basketball coach could tell you whether someone was skilled at shooting within the course of 10 minutes. Yes, it’s possible to get lucky and make a bunch of shots early on, but eventually they will trend toward their actual shooting percentage. The same is true in a technical field like computer programming. Within a short period of time, a good programmer would be able to tell if someone doesn’t know what they are talking about.

> It’s just like this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/451/

> But, what about stock picking? How long would it take to determine if someone is a good stock picker?*

> An hour? A week? A year?

> Try multiple years, and even then you still may not know for sure. The issue is that causality is harder to determine with stock picking than with other domains. When you shoot a basketball or write a computer program, the result comes immediately after the action. The ball goes in the hoop or it doesn’t. The program runs correctly or it doesn’t. But, with stock picking, you make a decision now and have to wait for it to pay off. The feedback loop can take years.

> And the payoff you do eventually get has to be compared to the payoff of buying an index fund like the S&P 500. So, even if you make money on absolute terms, you can still lose money on relative terms.

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-you-shouldnt-pick-individua...

Even Buffett himself has said that buying an index is probably the best way for most people.

If you're worried about any single country not being productive, just buy the index of the entire planet:

* https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/profile/VT

If the entire planet tanks… we probably have bigger problems at that point.

Generally, feel free to try to beat the market, but the odds are against you. We've know this at least the 1970s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street