[ QUOTE ]
Sell side Wall street loves buffet because they can point to him and everyone shakes their head up and down, with mouth wide open, believes they can do it.
[/ QUOTE ]
Wall street hates Buffett, because he rarely generates investment banking fees for them.
[ QUOTE ]
He is a business owner and investor that takes an active management role in the his companies.
[/ QUOTE ]
He had a twenty year record of crushing the indexes before he bought his first company.
He takes no active role in his wholly owned businesses, the vast majority send him a check on a monthly or quarterly basis. You'd understand how silly this myth is (created I believe by a leading EMT academic), if you knew how few people work at Berkshire Hathaway HQ, and how many subsidaries they have.
[ QUOTE ]
Buying 10,000 shares of IBM does not make you a business owner.
[/ QUOTE ]
According to Warren Buffett, it does.
[ QUOTE ]
Check out Effecient Frontier, Random Walk Down Wall Street and The Only Investment Guide you'll ever need if you want irrefutable evidence that active stock picking is a losers game.
[/ QUOTE ]
EMT has been effectively been gutted by Buffett himself, in his famous speech "
Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsvile". You should read this since you are well out of date in your understanding of the acceptance of EMT.
[ QUOTE ]
Living the lie is more fun than indexing and asset allocation, I agree.
But its still a lie.
[/ QUOTE ]
The real lie is to rely on thirty year old "theories" that have suffered with time.
There is a great deal of truth in the EMT. Beating the market isn't easy, the market is frequently efficient.
But to say the market is alwasy efficient and can't be beat by stock picking is to ignore the records of dozens of value investors who've done it for decades on end.
The evidence that EMT proponents used was biased and incomplete. Mutual funds don't beat indexes as a group, but mutual funds suffer from extraordinary structural limitations. To beat the market in this structure requires extroardinary skill.
And your central advice is useful. Most investors are better off with index funds, but not because successful stock picking is impossible, but because it's hard.
But you need to stop closing yourself off to new information, and realize there are great long term investors who beat the market, and almost all of them do it the same way Buffett has.